“... 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 ...”

“... Nation’ came, but it began to look increasingly threadbare as Ireland boomed with an economic self-confidence which seemed founded on exactly the sort of social consensus thought likely to produce long, accomplished novels. As early as the 1960s O’Connor and O’Faolain had begun to go out of fashion, their demise chronicled in John Montague’s ...”

“... I don’t remember which poems she read; I recall instead the gestures she didn’t make, her self-effacement. In the early 1980s, Larkin was lauded and Amis was famous; Jennings was reading with some student poets at the Old Fire Station arts centre. She was shy, and that brought out the shyness in me, so I didn’t speak to her. But I knew who she ...”

“... covered in dust and grime,’ he complains at the scene of battle – Ishiguro’s prose tends to self-parody. J.G. Ballard’s autobiographical novels, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, give much more effective accounts of wartime Shanghai: their sense of place is more vivid, and the ways in which the war dims ‘the brightest lightbulb in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... rule that the picturesque is based on someone else’s inconvenience. Harar is a walled city, self-contained. Though you are no longer required to leave your spear at the city gates, you are still very much an outsider here. Only two Europeans have made any impact, in the sense that their names are known and recognised. One is the English explorer Richard ...”

“... started investigating the matter. Comedians know it as well: hence the increasingly destructive self-importance of, say, Tony Hancock, with his futile efforts to get to grips with Bertrand Russell, both on screen and off. (Hence, too, the bizarre comic erudition of Ken Dodd, who has an enormous collection of theoretical writings about humour, and is fond of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... quite different? For contrivances such as these the novelist could be forgiven a Jamesian note of self-congratulation and self-encouragement, usually, in the Master’s case, expressed in French: voyons, voyons, mon bon! Let us see what I, and later what they, can make of this treatment. When Briony comes to the rescue of ...”

“... 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 ...”