“... in which a watersprite is grateful to a man for clearing out her ditches – and the almost self-parodic ‘Poem’:Love, I shall perfect for you the childWho diligently potters in my brainDigging with heavy spade till sods were piledOr puddling through muck in a deep drain.Fortunately, the going is not often so muddy, and the scale of Opened Ground ...”

“... That life should be an almost unsustainable struggle was an intrinsic part of Graham’s self-conception as a poet. ‘It is all a battle,’ he announced to his friend and partner in art, the painter John Minton. He and Dunsmuir lived in conditions of spectacular inconvenience: a poky caravan for some years and later a cottage to which the word ...”

“... its heart growing more beautiful 20 under the meaning under the soft hands of its undoing (‘Self-Portrait as Hurry and Delay’) This self-scrutinising frame-by-frame style was abandoned when continuous narrative memory was required for the autobiographical poems of Region of Unlikeness (1991). Memory oscillates (I ...”

“... bliss’, as Nabokov called it. It is a species of revelation, which includes self-revelation, by the most civilised means. That sounds portentous, but it may indicate something about the nature of inexplicably good moments in literary art, like Powell’s Widmerpool observing with approval: ‘Why, mother, you are wearing your bridge ...”

“... repetition has its eerie force, though. We have long realised that the Master is his own permanent self-invention, and we finally see that there is no limit to the vast contentment with which he can keep putting together the self he so enjoys and admires. Nothing unsettles him for long: defections, hostile ...”

“... another’ is followed by twenty seconds of silence ‘and then a chaffinch starts and/then another’ is followed by another twenty seconds of silence ‘and starts and starts’. This allows Oswald to do what she has always wanted to do, which is to represent being in time, where things recur and repeat, and in which attempts to pause and linger on the moment get thwarted by the necessary flow of time ...”

“... the present: abandoned by him, she again abandons herself, this time to her feelings in song. Her self-abandoned expression of abandonment is a hieroglyph of all four abandonings. It is a fundamental part of the male Western musical stage that the most large-scale, lavish, man-made performances should focus on one woman’s ...”

“... thought to be an illusion for the reason that both the form and the content of a discourse are not self-generated, but have the shape they do by virtue of relationships (of similarity and difference) with other discourses that are themselves relationally, not essentially, constituted. If literature, under some definitions, occupies (has title to) the realm of ...”

“... it has peculiarities they lack. The least of these is that nothing in Larkin’s work suggests the self-seeking showmanship which many other excellent writers can on occasion rise to, or sink to. This pales before the simple fact that Larkin is not dead. The contributors therefore face a situation capable of testing the keenest friendship, and they do it ...”

“... in the Guardian was rather anxious to cover himself by being wise to the author’s own supposed self-covering: ‘Martin Amis’s new novel is a metaphysical puzzle, a form that allows much latitude without holding an author accountable, it can always be passed off as temporary relaxation, spoof, dust in the earnest eye.’Quentin Oates speaks of ...”

“... been, to the women he has slept with, to the houses he has lived in, to Baby Becky and, not at all self-pityingly, to his old, slowly hazing-out disappearing self. For all his appetites and misdemeanours, Harry is understandable and, if understood, forgivable. He is a lens or prism, a middling man who serves his creator by ...”

“... or fairly recent history of the Balkan peoples suggests otherwise, even though it needs a deal of self-assurance to say so. The record, after all, cannot easily be made to appear encouraging. Forty-nine years ago the old dispensation from the First World War erupted in ferocious invasions and still worse civil wars; and bloodshed on a scale never before ...”

“... advising us on our best sexual behaviour (usually called maturity, or mental health or a decentred self). It is indeed, dismaying how quickly psychoanalysis has become the science of the sensible passions; as though its aim was to make people more intelligible to themselves rather than to realise how strange they are. When psychoanalysis makes too much ...”

“... forms, and by seeking individually and collectively to restrain it by means of a philosophy of self-control and a culture of indirection and discretion, at the high price of acquiring a ‘recognisable preferred neurotic style ... obsessional-compulsive neurosis’ (aggression makes you nervous). It would be hard to conceive a more ambitious historical ...”

“... the parties choose ‘rationally’, as Rawls puts it, which means on the basis of intelligent self-interest. However, behind the veil, they do not know what their particular interests are, so everyone’s self-interest has to be stylised in terms of a set of all-purpose or ‘primary’ goods – notably, liberty, money ...”