“... that we are whatever we summon the will to do.’ But Murdoch was scornful of this heroic self-image, writing that the gloom characteristic of existentialist writing ‘is superficial and conceals elation’. She had no use for voluntarism about value in either its French or British form: value requires us to turn our attention away from ...”

“... you cease folking up the literature, and you become “universal” [i.e., address the ‘narrow, self-serving parochialism of Europe’] – or else you perish in the backwater of small presses, you don’t get published by the “quality” presses, and you don’t receive the corresponding patronage of media-hype ... The pressure is to become a mulatto and ...”

“... all round the country, purporting to represent local black communities. Most of these consisted of self-appointed élites who imposed their will on their communities by fairly robust means, but they generally represented the temper of the times far better than the Uncle Tom municipal councillors they displaced. The Civics have continued into the new era as ...”

“... head and features, reminded me of one of those pink axolotls that float penis-like in aquaria. My self-image was not helped by people mistaking me for Peter in subsequent years. Having difficulty standing up, I was sitting cross-legged on a table. He introduced himself, congratulated me on a piece I had written and suggested we should get in contact as he ...”

“... him better than an Englishwoman, but might also be able to galvanise him with her energy and self-confidence as well as her humanity and sense. Perhaps his turning to Elizabeth was the result of homesickness, or just the reflex of a somewhat Boswellian desire to imitate more assured male friends, such as his old friend William Robertson, now a successful ...”

“... of how seriousness is being sacrified to trivialisation, and consequently with a more strident self-righteousness. But Manichean explanations are otiose. The Grub Street jobbing editor not only doesn’t see anything awful about being slipshod, he doesn’t see anything slipshod about being slipshod. He isn’t transgressing his standards. Those are his ...”

“... is not their intentional pastiche, their craven imitation of a style. Although the term ‘self-parody’ is in common use, ‘self-pastiche’ for some reason is not – but many artists who develop an original style early in life spend much of their careers creating works that would be considered pastiche if ...”

“... his own energy:                        Only through the hard Shaft-face of self-esteem parsimonious tears Are oozing, sour distillate from the core Of iron shame, the shame of private failure Shown up by the completeness of the dead. I wrote in the fierce hope of bursting loose From this regime, cracking its discipline … I ...”

“... create an Englishman of the Imperial decadence, a contemplative aesthete, incapable of action, who self-consciously reflects the mood of an inglorious period of English history. ‘Peterley [the house] seems now to be merely the symbol of an England that is lost for ever,’ Mr Pennington makes David Peterley write before casting off for Australia early in ...”

“... were held on divorce and abortion, while charges of sexual abuse tore into the Church’s self-image, exposing guardians as predators, the sinners as victims). Local bishops, confronted with visionaries and their followers, often chose scepticism, if not outright condemnation; were they not given to doubt, the shrines would spring up in greater ...”

“... are potentially released. Thus, in a way, ‘craft’ tends to connote not merely discipline and self-discipline, but a kind of restraint that will eventually be identified as minimalism, in another thematic opposition, never theorised directly, which runs centrally through McGurl’s book. From this perspective, maximalism is rhetoric and ...”

“... questions slavery’s centrality in the conflict – but that it too easily blends with the self-congratulatory complacency of the American civil religion, flattening the complexity of motives and reducing tragedy to melodrama. The quest for historical understanding is engulfed by the condemnation of the obvious wrong. ‘It was his business to inveigh ...”

“... in the English Renaissance (1995), demolished the fashion for ‘decentring’ the early modern self and reducing it to the play of language. She reminded us that such writers as Montaigne and Shakespeare had their own historically specific forms of scepticism, and that when Hamlet says he has that within that passes show we should explore not dismiss his ...”

“... Henry St George, the older novelist, offers the young writer Paul Overt a demonstration in self-sufficiency. He tells him a writer would do better not to marry, to put his passion into his work. Then marries the girl they both admire. That doesn’t stop Paul Overt offering an encomium to his elder and better. ‘Your talent’s so great that it’s ...”

“... exploited before in fiction, in Pale Fire above all, where the deranged Kinbote smothers with his self-obsessed commentary the poem he imagines he is serving. Here the situation is different. The annotator is also the novelist, who has somehow become separated from the novel he meant to write, or ‘excavate’, as if it existed already in every detail, and ...”