“... some foreshadowing of this process was already discernible when he was alive, but Longley was self-deprecating about such things: ‘I suppose that as you grow older some sense of an accumulating “oeuvre” is unavoidable,’ he told Peter McDonald in an interview, ‘but the very word sounds so pompous – you know, those people who talk about “my ...”

“... daemon, the imp, the spirit, the all-too-full bladder) to reveal unacknowledged parts of the self. Of course it does; but who else would put it that way? ‘My friend says it’s bad poetry to write a book/And I agree with her/I agree with her … … … … in principle,’ Bird says: she makes only minimal compromises with the formal demands of ...”

“... eschew ‘the old critical condescension towards Richardson’ as ‘bourgeois printer’ or ‘self-righteous moralist’. While more than one essayist refers to Ian Watt’s description of Pamela as a ‘mixture of sermon and striptease’, none admits the view to be correct. None, however, sets out to refute it. Instead, there are essays on the London ...”

“... around me as a battlefield full of mines that might blow me up,’ Padilla says of his earlier self. ‘I preferred that to the unyielding disease of routine.’ It isn’t easy to distinguish with certitude between a genuine concern for social justice and a love of hearing one’s own voice echoing through the corridors of powerlessness – or between a ...”

“... of the disease becomes a voyage of discovery – about the disease and its treatment – and of self-discovery. The mood not only never touches on self-pity, but makes one embarrassed for having entertained such a thought. Ivan Vaughan is as excited by his experiences, and his reactions to them, as a dog let loose in a ...”

“... by the NGOs as they almost invariably push for small-scale ‘local’, ‘democratic’, ‘self-sufficient’ initiatives and ‘public-private partnerships’. Now, however, the collective agenda has become so grand, so sweeping that it cannot be presented as merely a set of demands on the traditional political class. Consider the scale and duration ...”

“... From The Comic Sense of Henry James (1960) through A World Elsewhere (1966) and The Performing Self (1971) to Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977), Poirier has pursued a consistent and inventive enquiry into literary language, and into the politics of literary language. ‘When a writer is most strongly engaged by what he is doing, as if struggling for ...”

“... with the Soviet Union. No wonder the nation emerged with an identity problem. After the years of self-delusion, of aspiring only to the best clubs, reality hit rather hard. Nor did Argentina’s friends cover themselves in glory. Jeane Kirkpatrick, then US Ambassador to the United Nations, who championed Argentina as an example of the ‘authoritarian’ as ...”

“... citizenship by mutation and mutilation, dragged into a windy, see-through, Protestant world where self-acceptance became possible. The boy who once scraped at his skin with a razor to remove the brown – his Indian looks being a source of regret to the family – becomes a man jogging in the sun. But right from the start of the process, communication at home ...”

“... Board, why should he bother with an essay on its operation during the apartheid regime? It is self-censorship which really rivets his attention: how repression infects writers and turns even their defiance into self-mutilation. Coetzee asks us to imagine the inner world of the writer as if it were a zoo, ‘in which a ...”

“... in keeping her alive. Perhaps because Tillman isn’t a needy writer – she doesn’t perform self-satisfied tricks, she doesn’t concede, her bursts of humour are surreal and self-contained, close to private jokes – Mothercare is a peculiarly un-American book, free of ...”

“... significance of this image within an image is ambiguous. It could be a homage or a further act of self-fashioning or a private joke. I like to think that the two images point to Lanier’s varied artistic roles to come: as sitter in many portraits, a portrait painter himself, a designer and painter of dramatic scenery (the van Steenwyck looks like a stage ...”

“... which I adumbrated in the two previous articles, one which revolves around notions of metaphor and self-creation rather than around notions of truth, rationality and moral obligation, is better suited to such societies. I am not, however, saying that the Davidsonian-Wittgensteinian account of language, and the Nietzschean-Freudian-Bloomian account of ...”

“... keep from other people, but thoughts he is at pains to keep from himself: ‘It is as though the self is no longer the unity he has always taken it to be.’ And a little further on: ‘The I is an organisation that is distinguished by a very curious striving for unification, for synthesis.’ Our versatility in thinking of ourselves as separate from our own ...”

“... I’ll sleep instead on your rug, be your boy, just ask me to spread my legs, I’ll spread’ The self as teenage prostitute, as body for sale, physically open for inspection, becomes the self-appeasing, self-delighting soul who finally writes the poem, and delights in its internal ...”