“... police sirens. In Saundersland even a serial child rapist is endowed with a crudely noble set of self-conceptions, if only to be a more worthy foil to his repressed teenage hero and dreamy damsel in distress. The title story is a similarly straight tale of heroism, this time doubled: a near-suicidal man with cancer saves a boy from drowning in a frozen ...”

“... as well as by Chaucer: the patient Griselda, a complex figure in Chaucer, is here a model of ‘self-control, moral probity, piety, stalwart loyalty to her mate, humility, temperance, chastity and patience’. Another tale familiar from The Canterbury Tales, that of Melibee, sees a vengeful husband threatening his household’s welfare, while his ...”

“... men against the far right and the police, was to blame local tensions on the Asian propensity for self-segregation. There were years of authoritarian exhortations to embrace ‘Britishness’. But, as the Blairite columnist Dan Hodges has argued, ‘trying to ape the language of the BNP succeeded only in boosting the BNP.’ It also gave Cameron the ...”

“... novel: it relies on an episodic structure to suggest that Lou is driven compulsively to repeat self-destructive actions without ever learning anything from them, and so risks treading the same ground more than once. But it sets out Hyland’s real skill, which is to create in her readers almost physically painful cringes of embarrassment and ...”

“... and the ‘baroque’. The first, which stresses prudence, thrift, individual morality and self-reliance, was typical of commercial and financial oligarchies from 17th-century London to 20th-century New York. The second emphasises the pastoral role of the state and its duty to create social harmony and exalt hierarchy through ‘a well-ordered public ...”

“... for each younger generation, that things aren’t going to be the slightest bit different for my self-aware, sophisticated age group. We’ll all go down babbling about some Rosebud or other. We’ve started already, at first with our signature irony, but increasingly like the old farts our parents and theirs used to be. We’re all old farts now. There ...”

“... outsider. Basara has here defined the most fundamental and powerful of fictional engines – the self-observing observer, riddled by doubt. But he also has a problem, a problem he’s too committed to avoid: his particular amalgam of fictive loners has nothing really to rail against; unlike the others, he is created not by his situation but by authorial ...”

“... Marxism and state paternalism. This stems partly from a failure to relocate a sense of self that can cope with the globalised world while remaining in tune with traditional attitudes: ‘What those whites did was to occupy us. It wasn’t just the land: they occupied our very selves, they set up camp right inside our heads.’ The chief ...”

“... shells up to them at’ turns its quatrain round with an awkwardness to match any Dreadnought. ‘Self-censorshipped’ may deserve a momentary smile for its nautical pun, but leaning on it as a rhyme word for ‘tight-lipped’ stretches the joke to breaking point. Despite a few misplaced nuts and bolts, and even if the narrative sometimes chunters rather ...”

“... remarked that with Moore it wasn’t so much a case of kiss and tell as tell and not kiss. His self-dramatisations might be traceable to his parents’ taunts that only an old and ugly woman would wish to marry him. Unrequited love led him unchivalrously to boot Pearl Craigie’s backside during a walk in Hyde Park – or at least to fantasise about doing ...”

“... Put that way, and understood as an experiment with the aim of discouraging writerly pretension or self-indulgence, the Pledge doesn’t sound so bad. Indeed, when one gets to the stories themselves, it is not the restrictions of the manifesto that are the problem: any of these pieces could find its way into any number of anthologies and not excite particular ...”

“... that genre persisted – is itself noteworthy, for it confirms that a modern sensibility of the self as something created through a combination of choice and circumstance was becoming part of their culture. There are too few of these stories for them to carry conviction as evidence, however. Appleby’s book, nearly as much as Butler’s, is a ...”

“... drums are not about to fly (as the line break initially suggests) into some sublime paradise of self-expression, but are threatening to lose the beat, which would strand the soloist in musical outer space. Somehow this doesn’t happen, but the energy of the music – and of much of Kleinzahler’s poetry – derives from a calculated flirtation with ...”

“... was emphatic and unmistakable in Proust’s text, and had much to do with the cycles of reflective self-contempt and self-analysis that characterise his extended deliberations. But Rose’s Albertine, watching a pair of flamboyant Jewish sisters parading in a hotel ballroom, approves of their openly sexual display. She even ...”

“... to be very intelligent,’ Eliot intoned) were shown to have roots in complex and deliberately self-concealing theories – not only of literature, but of history and economics too. Irreverently probed by Eagleton and others, even the academic subject called ‘English’ began to own up to its stake in the political programme it had been invented to ...”