“... to keep yourself safe ... In short, you can become a little Odysseus, lying, disguising your true self.’) And some of the more interesting contributions (by Charles Martindale, for example, and Vanda Zajko) take the time to reflect on the perils of writing about oneself, and on how far the written self must inevitably be ...”

“... try too hard. The stance of ‘promise-victimised’ was picked up early on. At first, it was a self-defensive social ploy but over the years it was coaxed into a thoroughgoing style: a life-style and a work-style. Observing the dinner-table impact of lordly non-producers like Logan Pearsall Smith and Desmond MacCarthy, Connolly in his mid-twenties realised ...”

“... I nibble leafage’. Some readers sympathise with the narrator while others find her appallingly self-absorbed and demanding, but no one has criticised Rush for his ventriloquism. I suspect this is not because he managed it so well, but because by situating most of the novel in Africa, where he lived and worked for six years, he was shielded by the authority ...”

“... greatest theme. Some of Hogg’s poems in the Spy, as Scottish poems like to do, trumpet a rather self-satisfied nationalism. Scottish writers are too fond of gazing at the thistle. Over the last few centuries, canny Scottish writers have liked to hustle, often embarrassingly. Boswell was self-consciously, sycophantically ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of a child. Smoothed from the national laundry is a crease. The penguin. Its raised beak. Its self-important air. An advice bird. Rising trumpets lift up through shafts of attic sunlight. Sound-motes. The air is soothed. Chords on dusty keys. There she goes! Straight as a die! Tantara! (ii) A press of the old against the young, craning their necks to ...”

“... Something goes away and something comes back. But through you. Leaving no trail but self. As trails go not much of                      one. But patiently you travel it. Your self. You hardly disturb anything actually, isn’t it strange. For all ...”

“... areas are now well on the way to being broken up and redeveloped. The architecture of the ‘self-financing’ management institute is encroaching steadily, and even the stretches of parkland that remain seem to be infested with moles. The business schools have been covering the ground with Malcolm Bradbury, Martin Wiener and Correlli Barnett. Their ...”

“... one,’ Ricks says of the volume, since the two subjects, heroism and the heroic line, are not self-evidently one. Making them converge requires the critic to find heroic lines embedded within prose works (he finds a lot of them, some less heroic than others) and even to make sonnets from heroic lines embedded in the novels of Mailer. Heroic conduct treads ...”

“... town like ’s-Hertogenbosch stormed by Turkish troops. ‘The demonic siege of the Christian self,’ Koerner comments, ‘thus expands to encompass the entire ecumene.’ It continues in the present, and not only in the perceived Muslim threat to Europe, as Koerner details in a bravura reading of Adoration of the Magi (c.1490-1500). In this ‘decisive ...”

“... in horror as a country they admired for its pragmatism and sangfroid fell into pseudo-Churchillian self-delusion.I gleaned two new facts on my way to see the Old Masters at the Gemäldegalerie. One was that ‘the imperative to open windows’ is now part of many Berlin rental agreements. The other was that opera venues, keen to get up and running, will only ...”

“... The War allowed me to project, – to EMBODY, – an ultimate ‘aspect’ of the ‘self’ … Such extreme typesetting reflects extreme states of mind: the speaker here is the great dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, depicted in 1919 as he goes mad. If you read the books in order you will also learn early on about Bidart’s early life. Raised far from ...”