“... there, a roll there’, and wonders ‘if there wasn’t, in their fatness, some simple element of self-assertion’. That a man in Guerrillas is overweight indicates sinister intent.Neglect of the body in his work is like a moral fault. In Uganda we exercised by running round a sports field. Naipaul said that only ‘infies’ – inferiors – allowed ...”

“... in the letters and his ‘scientific’ papers, heterosexuality is, among other things, a form of self-hatred; after all, what is so distasteful about one’s own sex that one has, so exclusively, to desire the opposite one? The interesting link that psychoanalysis had constructed between paranoia and homosexuality revealed something even more disquieting ...”

“... utter hell’, and has ‘Grown far too crotchety to like/A luxury hotel’. There is plenty of self-parody in this picture – a little later in the poem he identifies his worry about where the next drink is coming from as ‘grahamgreeneish’ – but this was a time when Auden was rearranging his sense of himself and of his world. Comedy was one sort of ...”

“... entirety. Most OuLiPian texts astonish not by their powers of expansion, however, but by their self-imposed laws of constraint. The best known of these are Georges Perec’s lipogrammatic La Disparition (1969), composed without once using the letter e, and his Les Revenentes (1972), which contains no vowels except e. Over the years OuLiPians have developed ...”

“... habits, other people’s defeats’, and languishes in ‘quiet desperation and muted icy self-destroying rage’. But Yates reserves his special scorn for attempts to transcend this environment. Mailer’s terms may have been tough, but at least he offered 1950s man some alternatives: he must be hip or square, ‘with it’ or ‘doomed not to ...”

“... the need never to be wrong. Just as Donne was Empson’s preferred sensibility – his most vivid self-portrait is his portrait of Donne in his great essay of 1957, ‘Donne the Space Man’, in which Donne is referred to as an ‘intellectual buccaneer’ of ‘defiant brilliance’ – the Judeo-Christian God’s was the sensibility he dreaded, never in ...”

“... cockney wideboys in British gangster flicks. Xan – who shares his surname with Duane Meo, John Self’s ‘whizzkid editor’ in Money – is sardonically described as a ‘Renaissance Man’: he has published a short story collection called Lucozade, and plays rhythm guitar in a Camden café ‘every second Wednesday’. His old man, Mick Meo ...”

“... The reader is invited to fall in with a persona of Baedekered cosmopolitanism and sensual self-assurance. ‘We are prepared to enjoy stone in the South. For, as we come to the southern light of the Mediterranean, we enter regions of coherence and of settled forms.’ The prose nimbly sidesteps stock wordings and standard speech rhythms: ‘Stone ...”

“... spying on prostitutes and their clients through a hole in the wall. But although money, power and self-gratification seem the only values that matter in the world around him, he’s nevertheless fascinated by the wholesome ménage in the flat underneath his own, where a widower, Holst, lives with his 16-year-old daughter, Sissy. When Frank lies in wait to ...”

“... for production of versions of the Prayer Book was 1850, the height of the empire’s vigour and self-confidence, and despite subsequent decline, around a thousand editions still appeared in the 20th century. (I myself was partly responsible for one of them.) Brian Cummings’s version has a certain memorial quality, partly because it answers so many ...”

“... and napping at his desk when he was tired. His masters might get exasperated with his serene self-absorption, but he continued to bring credit to the house through his reputation as a philosophical virtuoso, and they still valued his opinions and took pleasure in having him at their elbow as a personal ‘living dictionary’. He distinguished himself ...”

“... the company of the English novelist most known for the relentless pessimism of his novels and the self-destructive tendencies of his life. The dean of Gissing studies, Pierre Coustillas, has for decades provided Gissing materials and support to other scholars, but Delany is the first in more than 25 years to produce a full-scale biography, and the first to ...”

“... experience’. No serious naturalist could deny it. Nevertheless, beginning in the 20th century, self-styled naturalists have seemed to think that questioning or doubting or denying the existence of experience is part of a thoroughgoing naturalism. How did this happen? It began with the transmogrification of behaviourism early in the 20th ...”

“... as you are. People who are not only unable but unwilling to admit certain truths whose logic is self-evident to you. Who don’t even seem to care that their logic is bad.’ ‘But that’s because they’re free,’ Joey said. ‘Isn’t that what freedom is for? The right to think whatever you want? I mean, I admit, it’s a pain in the ass ...”

“... Those were spirited, eloquent, witty (anyone who met Larkin would have been struck by the marked self-consciousness of his witty manner, which resembled that of a knight of the theatre). The ones here are far less eloquent. Only a few of them were written before Larkin moved to Belfast in the autumn of 1950, to become a librarian at Queen’s University. His ...”