“... settles in with her husband, Pran, a shopkeeper, only to discover that he is caught in a web of self-serving lies and deceptions, along with his parents, the extended family and what seems at times to be the entire Asian merchant culture. The novel raises many questions about the standard depiction of Ugandan Asians as victims of theft, rape, violence ...”

“... Professional tennis requires extraordinary psychological capacities – obsessive focus, epic self-belief – so it would be surprising if the players at the top were perfectly well adjusted. Being motivated by an insatiable desire to win, no matter the physical or emotional cost, is more like a pathology than healthy competitive spirit. It’s striking ...”

“... trying out different approaches at different moments: memoir, mystery, gleeful doomscroll, self-conscious epic of the American berserk (‘Of arms and the murderer I sing’). The shifts in tone that accompany these experiments are the book’s least successful feature. Sarcastic asides (‘How about a little arsenic, Scarecrow?’), solemn injunctions ...”

“... that wagged its tail, snorted or purred. Averse to multiculturalism in France, Bardot became the self-appointed emissary of a mixed-species nation, from domesticated rabbits to baby seals, doing her best to speak out on their behalf. She took their rights as seriously as she took her mission. Mosquitoes, clams and Mediterranean oysters were not on her list ...”

“... to silence his ‘Toxic Inner Critic’ and become more assertive. Cusk adopted a mode of self-erasure; she has talked about an ‘annihilated perspective’ – what Faye calls a more passive ‘way of living in the world’. Key to the project was the fact that Cusk was looking for an alternative not just to the novel but to confessional ...”

“... as the ‘what to’ were acknowledged. In the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties the presentation of self through clothes, and thus the presentation of fashion, changed. The magazines used more photographs, and those drew on personal fantasies more often than on social ones. Where you were going no longer predicted what you would go in. Plotting the ...”

“... then, is traditional in design, but it is also very modern, old but sounding new, simple yet self-referring in that it is a story about stories of the type it is itself, or, more simply, a story about Story. What it has to say about Story amounts to a demand for narrative or imaginative freedom, for the rights and duties of artists, and, by extension, of ...”

“... not ‘Hunter’, if Dische is making a Mitford point, as she seems to be, about ‘class self-consciousness’ – a neat term invented by Benedikt’s Jewish colleague Dr Graf. Another stylistic oddity is that all flower names are in German. Perhaps they are meant to evoke the lyrical side of the German character, whereas the gruff absence of ...”

“... The full career of Jim Henson reveals that the gulf between the traditions of fairy tale and the self-inventing styles of television culture generally thought to have supplanted them is not as wide as the disparity between the two frogs would suggest. For a start, one played the other in a film called The Frog Prince (1971). Inextricably linked with ...”

“... preceding slope of the curve. Disruptive counter-cultures? Endemic civil wars? Reritualisation? Self-defeating pursuit of material consumption in a perpetual potlatch? There is no way in which we can possibly know what will happen, and still less can we even guess how it will be conceptualised when it does. This last point, indeed, is perhaps the one most ...”

“... over every opinion, leaving a desolating sense that they are all equally prejudiced, naive or self-serving. Judges, barristers, liberal critics, pornographers and poets are all put in what Sutherland presumably regards as their place, though it is not at all clear where those places are. It would be ungracious of me not to mention that one exception is ...”

“... century’. I did not laugh at him then and do not now. Nevertheless I think he showed a lack of self-knowledge. He has proved himself to be a man of exceptional gifts, but his mind has displayed a religious rather than a scientific ...”

“... they are all decent men and women,” I thought, as I paid my bill at the garage; and then with self-pity added, ‘Who knows if it is any worse here than everywhere else?” ’ There are some good stories in Visitors Book. I was already familiar with Robert Bernen’s ‘Tales From the Bluestacks’, his evocations of a life spent among the sheep-farmers ...”

“... or ‘inconsistency’ of his is a clue that the novel is one of those cute self-consuming artefacts. But this is unlikely. Homer sometimes nods. Wilson’s nods and becks and wreathed smiles are sometimes harder to take unseriously. In a sentence which is less exactly put than is his way, he has Severus Egg attend to ‘the stamp of his ...”

“... on progress, paralysing creative energy. It is invested with determinative force. It undermines self-confidence – for George Gilbert Scott it doomed architects to ‘capricious eclecticism’. It is the hump on the back of the cripple rather than the pack carried by the pilgrim. From wanting the past, the argument proceeds to knowing the past, and since ...”