“... poem of his first book, Nil Nil (1993), imagined a sullen second persona being spawned from self-inflicted defeat in a one-man game of snooker; successive poems in that book and his next volume, God’s Gift to Women (1997), brought in twin sisters, a foetus seen as an effigy, a dead brother, the repetitions of parenthood and family more generally, the ...”

“... to, the Fashion, could not trust his Works with the Vulgar without Notes longer than the Work, and Self-praises, to tell them what he meant, and that he had a Meaning, in this or that Place. And thus every-one was taught to read with his Eyes. The image of Georgian England that still prevails today, some commentators argue, is Georgian England as Pope saw ...”

“... listen for silence.(‘What else’)No single word of this/is any more than decoration of an old self-magnifying wish/to throw the self away so violently and widely …/it can’t, because its motor runs on a conviction that if I understood/my own extent of blame then that would prove me agent; it doesn’t/want to face a ...”

“... cancel the barge as it approaches the corner of avenues. Well, we sweated that out. It amounts to self-importance. Whether the sea is a vernacular one only heroes can describe. Why don’t you pluck me one? Seems they all rushed to the other side of the deck, causing alarm. Wind shrivelled the rags that were left. Hold on a minute, we’ll get you aloft. No ...”

“... to finally  make it  will mean    entering an unbearably vulnerable self    where i do some version of complete love  complete  forgiveness  complete   acceptance complete difference      but properly    not only touching the human bits    but touching everything       fish fumble and  sing ...”

“... with the way some men behave when a love affair turns sour. Most men, he argues, will attempt self-justification, telling themselves that ‘“she did not deserve my love,” or “she disappointed me,” or offering some other such “reasons”’. This is a ‘profoundly unchivalrous attitude’, since it burdens the abandoned woman ‘not only with ...”

“... a second wife in circumstances felt as not altogether usual:       his fair daughter’s self, as I avowedAt starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll goTogether down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’ is a tricky poem: very striking in its own ...”

“... to it honour, peace of mind and the welfare of their children. It is the foundation of their self-worth, despite the daily evidence on every street in every part of town that money does not necessarily reward energy and virtue, or punish stupidity and sloth. Though dimly aware that money is an invention of human beings, they ascribe to it an external ...”

“... not getting through, can stand in the way of the storytelling impulse. If there’s no room for a self-conscious narrator any more, there’s always the self-consciousness of the characters to fall back on: and Lively’s characters, here as in her other novels, are nothing if not ...”

“... the first thirty years of his life – the period that culminated in the writing of The Divided Self, his first and best book – together with a lengthy diatribe on what he takes to be contemporary psychiatry. One cannot but be appalled and angered by much of what is said here. ‘No facts,’ Laing tells us in the introduction, ‘are in ...”

“... He argues that where the mainstream reader would have enjoyed an ultimately consoling drama of self-reliance – the story of a decision reached, for better or worse, and its consequences accepted – the avant-garde reader would have detected a far from consoling essay on the dissolution of subjectivity. ‘For a ...”

“... He testifies before Congress in support of Nasa’s Earthlike Planet Seeker programme, a giant self-assembling mirror to be deployed near Jupiter with the aim of detecting habitable planets and alien life. After the coup, the project is scotched along with the NextGen Telescope, $12 billion and thirty years in the making (a device that sounds a lot like ...”

“... with a particular history. There is something parochial about these New Yorkers even in their self-searching self-laceration. But then the point of the story – and its method – is precisely that anyone’s consciousness is constructed out of what’s local, what’s near at hand. A dark stream of pessimism flows ...”

“... glows with a godly aura. Among the ‘New Hoover Convertibles’ is The New Jeff Koons (1980), a self-portrait which, enlarged from a family photo of the artist-to-be not long after his fateful encounter with the cereal box, also radiates a special wellbeing, here the wellbeing of a middle-class boy circa 1960. Shirt buttoned up, hair neatly combed, young ...”

“... its protagonist, evinces a worldview that is best described as aspirant Rothdike: all raging self-justification and would-be poetic observation of the world one is about to abdicate. The novel’s randy but decrepit hero is Raphael Haffner, aged 78: a retired London banker whose wife has recently died. We first encounter him inside a wardrobe in a hotel ...”