“... 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 ...”

“... implausible – it isn’t surprising that he should want to hit the child, but would he lack the self-control and intelligence to restrain himself, especially since he knows he’s been set up? He has, after all, faced more formidable enemies. Questioned by the headmaster, Frankie supports Tony, claiming that the teacher hit him for no reason ...”

“... can know a real world whose solidity cannot be dissolved even by the most imaginative exercise in self-fashioning. He is not won over by Postmodernist models of social science in which there has been a wholesale abandonment of the objectivist hopes of its classical practitioners. Much of what Simpson says should encourage ...”

“... the oral judgment at base still represents the process of thinking aloud. A judgment which is not self-explanatory, like the arrêts of the French courts, is not a lot of help to others. It simply compels researchers to seek out the materials that went into it. But a judgment which goes round the houses is not a lot of help either. Keeping it short is a ...”

“... Flora Drew’s translation of The Noodle Maker is more graceful than the original, lacking the self-conscious rudeness of the Chinese and the uneasy kinship with Maoist style. The Nobel citation in 2000 described Gao Xingjian’s novel One Man’s Bible as a book ‘settling the score with the terrifying insanity usually referred to as China’s Cultural ...”

“... determined to write Nivison out of the script, however. The show includes Hopper’s one mature self-portrait on canvas but omits its companion, Jo Painting (1936), which is also in the Whitney collection. In fact, Nivison has been all but expunged from the record as far as this exhibition and its catalogue are concerned. At the press preview, the show’s ...”

“... the rich portrayal of Mingus and Dylan’s friendship. Lethem’s approach to race is extremely self-conscious throughout The Fortress of Solitude. The bridge between the two halves of the novel is a piece of Dylan’s journalism, the liner notes for a box set of Barrett Rude Junior, ‘one of the greatest soul singers who ever lived’. Dylan’s black ...”