“... Saif says. One doesn’t at all, however, feel that all this is just more of the old modern self-referentiality and so forth: the novel is actually interested in the ways in which it can contain a life, and also various ways of life; and it is part of its substance that Asyah struggles with the narrative of her own life, imposing upon her own history ...”

“... in his ‘theatrical’ films of the mid-Fifties, addresses this condition of film with great self-irony.) Rushdie also unjustly dismisses the dream source of Dorothy’s Oz: ‘The film, like the TV soap opera Dallas, introduces an element of bad faith when it permits the possibility that everything that follows’ – from Dorothy’s being knocked ...”

“... ornamental and anachronistic institution’. He writes, not by royal appointment, but as the self-appointed demystifier and debunker. He dates most of the mystification and bunk to the last quarter of the 19th century, when the invention of tradition took wings in creating a more appealing image for the monarchy: ‘the hitherto unpopular and reclusive ...”

“... world beyond, of the art scene and its failures. Hughes brings out Auerbach’s persistence, his self-critical unease, the depth of his roots in the culture of painting, his allegeiance to drawing, the carnal presence of his work. A lesser critic might have made myths out of all this – the thick paint, the fanaticism, the terribilita. But there is a ...”

“... produced artificial intelligence programs that have ‘gone critical’ and achieved humanlike self-consciousness. Herein lies a favourite theme of Gibson and Sterling: the official institutions of a society always work on yesterday’s agenda, while the future is being made by an underground of anarchists, criminals and fanatics. The ...”

“... of Innisfree’ and to WBY’s later poems, but the comparison defeats them. The redundancy, the self-caressing repetition – ‘the little lakes, the little colleens by the lakes’ – show that the lyrical surge is to be released from any obstacle, any knowledge. When we come to ‘that heaving place of his own heart’, we know that the claim of ...”

“... of the river, dying, in defeat’: those are the cadences not of regret or heroism but of a fading self, the music of disappearance. Bolivar sees a woman at night in his encampment. She is singing a popular song under her breath: ‘Tell me it’s never too late to die of love.’ Almost certainly there is no one there, and Bolivar’s servant, in later ...”

“... few years’: that is, he is old, not just growing old. He dwells, sometimes specifically, never self-indulgently, on the attendant disadvantages. Yet the tone and style are, very agreeably, much as they were when the author was merely senescent – quietly distinctive, largely resigned, a bit grumpy. The locutions are occasionally a touch arthritic, as when ...”

“... about psychoanalysis and the significance of its history. Given that ambivalence, and therefore self-doubt, are integral to the theory, it is remarkable how unwilling psychoanalysts have been to write anything about their hatred, or their love, of psychoanalysis. It would be particularly interesting for those who love psychoanalysis to tell us their ...”

“... The Sense of an Ending, but has no difficulty whatever in demonstrating that it is often naive and self-contradictory. In his long struggle for an intelligent view of realism, of language and especially literary language as intimately related to the world we live in, he has developed formidable machinery and uses it with gusto and learning. Why then a certain ...”

“... have been deployed; but Keynesian remedies dismissed – whilst markets have been denied any self-stabilising properties. The book is a bran tub of pessimism. For most outsiders, this is of little import, and one set of doom merchants must be much like another. But this is not the case. For Rees-Mogg and Davidson have a great rival in peddling doom, one ...”

“... encouraging any such trace on the reader’s face is even more so. Any sneers that do arise are self-induced, the product of an ideology considerably meaner than the expedition’s. Captain ‘Titus’ Oates is afraid to remove his sock lest his gangrened toes come with it. ‘Do you reckon a man without feet could still ride to hounds?’ he jokes, and is ...”

“... is not in any meaningful sense a war novel. It is an artistically artful vision of a child’s self-protective reaction to a life totally disrupted, in part fiction, yet only dubiously a novel. When J.G. Ballard decided to use the material of his early life as basis for a prose work (and the decision must have been difficult and painful), he must have ...”

“... blames the collapse of Communism on the strength of the American dollar and on Gorbachev, the ‘self-important fool’ with ‘birdshit on his head’ who got into bed with Reagan and Bush. His one remaining hero is the late Nicolae Ceausescu, a ‘mad hog’ no doubt, but ‘at least he had a bit of spine’ when his former henchmen turned against him. For ...”

“... never know what’s really going on so they are easy to trick), and a greater readiness for self-sacrifice. Of course men sacrifice themselves too, and they get to do it with panache, their sacrifice crowned either with success or by a hero’s death. Noble women, on the other hand, are ‘presented as slogging on ... and on and on’. No wonder women ...”