“... that needs to be administered vaginally’ – is lost beneath the weight of the character’s self-pity. In short, the author is everywhere and nowhere in this novel. For ever wriggling inside his characters in order to ventriloquise his own aphorisms, he can never get enough distance from them to grasp the real foolishness or enormity of their ...”

“... three resident Serbian families and one Croat. The Partisans may have carried the idea of local self-management down from the mountains with the ideological fervour of Marxists, but here power was still yoked to ethnicity. Ironically, a Jew saved Nikola Blazevic’s life. As railway superintendent, Blazevic had used his prior notice of plans for the ...”

“... a level and left the fundamental problems unsolved’. ‘Too high a level’ was the level of self-reflection – knowledge of one’s states of consciousness. This leaves quite untouched the prior question of the nature of the mental states themselves – the pains, the tickles, the seeings of red, the smellings of roses. How do these spring from mere ...”

“... his longing to reveal himself, in his writing, was made difficult by an equally strong fear of self-revelation. This is not a new concept – something very similar was seen by Winnicott as constituting the basic psychological make-up of all artists – but that doesn’t make it any less plausible. What, then, were the childhood experiences that led to ...”

“... years. And it contained, as it almost always does, a strong grain of sense beneath the deliberate self-parody. He is right that something must be seriously wrong when a senior British journalist can prefer to edit the Mail rather than the Times. (Indeed, he might have added that matters are even worse when his own editor-in-chief, Max Hastings, rejects the ...”

“... charabanc as it makes its amiable progress through the better journals. The tone is a pert self-argument, a kind of educated mutter, as if life presented itself to Enright as an exam that needed to be marked – one can hear the tick and scrape of the red pen. In ‘Confetti’, for instance, the poet calls a taxi to take him and his pregnant wife to ...”

“... set in London, the alien city to which many Scots were driven by joblessness in the Twenties. The self-consciously brittle tone recalls Lewis’s Apes of God, early Huxley, and Eliot’s young man carbuncular. There are daring-for-the-time references to casual sexual intercourse, Stopesian contraceptive devices, cheap silken undergarments, pick-ups in Lyons ...”

“... another by letter. At Christmas, after a debasing night with a senator, Vera, in a drunken act of self-abasement, sends them each a card: ‘I’m no fucking good. Make me an offer.’ The horrified siblings at once join forces to wrest the property away from her. Her brother Tom writes her an officious letter, declaring that the hotel will be sold by auction ...”

“... a second language has mattered so greatly to us. When I look a long way back, to disinter my child-self first becoming attached to French at the age of nine or ten, I fancy I find it becoming newly detached at the same time from English, as if first meeting up with a foreign language meant also coming to a more fastidious view of language as such: a great ...”

“... stuff, though it went down well at the time, but it shows the eye for strong effects and rather self-consciously powerful situations which Hughes was to construct in his last unfinished trilogy, and in ideas for the films and plays which he kept attempting to write throughout his career. What constitutes a Jamesian clou, even in that crudely dramatic ...”

“... its modern expression in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, Galicia and the Pays Basque’. The self-evident rottenness of the timber that stokes the fire is beside the point: what matters is the fire, the heat of it and the light it throws. (Which is not to deny that in the case of poets better than either MacDiarmid or Graves we respect the soundness of ...”

“... problem is intensified by the large claims which the publishers make on behalf of their series. A self-confessed revision crammer might be undesirable, but it would be relatively harmless – a book in whose company candidates could while away the final weeks before the exam itself. But ‘course companions and study guides’ are in danger of doing much more ...”

“... wondered who would be there Worthy of being his true self to. A girl there           babys her eyes and sends her gaze Widening to wander through The sipping archipelagoes Of frantic islands. Graham’s eclectic techniques and sense of continuity in a national tradition help him to sound timeless when ...”

“... unconquerable air of slightly arrogant courtesy and extreme intelligence. I suspect this apparent self-possession was often hard-won. His lot was a lonely one. His power of abstract concentration was legendary, but in the right company he could be gregarious and convivial. His life in China did not give all that much of a chance. I was often acutely aware ...”

“... our slippery language is honourable: but when it leads him to such impractical stringencies, it is self-defeating. Moreover, what we call ‘stringencies’ may as well be called, if we shift the focus only a little, ‘self-indulgences’. In some of the earlier and less strenuous essays here, he shows he can recognise with ...”