“... back to life. Being in heaven is like participating in a not especially intellectually rigorous self-help encounter group. It’s also oddly consumerist: when Susie tells Franny that she doesn’t really know what she wants out of heaven, Franny tells her, ‘“All you have to do is desire it, and if you desire it enough and understand why – really know ...”

“... or good friends across what used to be a road – play in our Chief Boogey’s humanism and his self-defence? Ya’alon’s interviewer writes about the new Chief of Staff in language that now sounds like a parody of the sort of thing journalists wrote in 1967: When he speaks – he speaks; he says whatever is on his mind. And what’s on his mind is ...”

“... temporally remote. It’s unmistakeably the Deep South, but the world of the novel is hermetically self-contained. The heroine is Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, 12 years old, ‘sturdily built, like a small badger, with round cheeks, a sharp nose, black hair bobbed short, a thin, determined little mouth’. When she was a baby, her big brother Robin was ...”

“... the dozen. It’s a book in a lower key that doesn’t end, like the others, with a tricksy bit of self-reflexivity about narrative. It takes its tone from the title story, which is atypical of Simpson, and nothing like a fable, but quite like life. Characters appear in more than one story, so destroying the jigsaw effect. I wonder whether her fans will be ...”

“... And there’s a threat contained within the thing itself – a nasty suspicion that it could self-destruct. These fears arise from Cragg’s ways of relating the elements of a work so that he seems to be keeping the lid on a potential explosion. And the threats to the spectator and the work alike are heightened in the glass sculptures because of a ...”

“... All this might have a fascination for the author himself and for the more prurient reader but the self-portrait simply isn’t interesting enough to merit so much baring of the soul. Another trouble is that some of Logue’s anecdotes are Pooterish in their absurdity. There is an occasion when a writer in the Times Literary Supplement accuses T.S. Eliot of ...”

“... bits of string. Lieutenant Robert, the young conscript who is for the moment the author’s other self, and who will make a cursory appearance later in the novel as an Italian Count, is formally invited to dinner by the Marchese on whom he is billeted; and he is more preoccupied with making his appearance fit for High Society than with the delirious export of ...”

“... one and one who says ‘fuck’ a lot, while Andrew shares his body with, among others, an inner self-helper, a frightened little boy, a kindly maiden aunt and a grimly competent ‘protector’. Seferis, the protector, is a nine-foot-tall student of martial arts; he speaks only in Greek and, like the Incredible Hulk, can perform improbable feats when he’s ...”

“... confidence in the institution or a radical rethink of its operation. It would be impertinent and self-contradictory to suggest that the rulings of the Court of Appeal and the Law Lords were or could be wrong in law. Those rulings are the law. But we should consider their implications for the human rights of those facing deportation or, failing ...”

“... one thinks of the current leader’s policies the case for unseating him is not absolutely self-evident. Those electoral calculations which have clearly influenced the behaviour of Labour MPs in the last month do have some force. Nevertheless, whatever calculations one makes about electoral advantage or disadvantage, the fact is that the Labour Party ...”

“... the theory of the novel, a deconstruction of narrativity – was inaccessible: it was ‘the most self-reflexive novel that it’s possible to write’, a book written ‘tongue-in-cheek’, she admits, ‘for a few narratologist friends’. But deconstruction rejoices to demonstrate that an author has really done the opposite of what she meant to do, and ...”

“... knife) ten years before he decided to attack his wife: he was acquitted, on grounds of legitimate self-defence. Perhaps this happy outcome encouraged him in the belief that his luck would hold. If so, he was mistaken; we gave him 12 ...”

“... The novel runs down to a predictable conclusion. Mitchell fudges Eiji’s final moment of self-awareness, almost as if he has lost interest in the ending himself: ‘I feel sad that I found what I searched for, but no longer want what I found. I wait, and cross back over Omekaido Avenue. I feel release. I complete one, two, three circuits. I can go ...”

“... when it was crueller than he knew; but this isn’t sufficient cause for Jem’s adult misery and self-mutilation (which isn’t to say that just because her depression doesn’t originate in trauma it is any less real or unpleasant). Jem’s problem is conveyed by the novel’s form as much as anything: she is locked in the past; her sense of time is ...”

“... Insofar as she has been recovered at all it has been by feminist scholars excited by the self-conscious modernity of her Galesia trilogy, The History of the Amours of Bosvil and Galesia (1713), A Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1723) and The Lining of the Patch-Work Screen for the Ladies (1726). (They became available in a fully annotated OUP ...”