“... Arts Council, or other such bodies, of the magazines in which short stories often appear, fosters self-indulgence. Certainly this is a term that came to my mind more than once when reading the works under review. For the novelist, experimentation is both demanding and risky, in that his whole enterprise may go haywire and prove unsaleable. The short-story ...”

“... that it is. As he has explained in what he has written about Chicago and about the bewildered self-contempt of blue-collar workers in Boston in the late 1960s, and as he has most elaborately argued in The Fall of Public Man, Sennett believes that the collapse of an imaginatively and practically robust public life in the United States has left a ...”

“... underneath. This was who she was now. It felt muddy in her lungs, weird air.Erin passes her low self-esteem onto the narrators of her grim, funny books. In the novella, Maison Close, Amethyst plays foil and adoring public to her brilliant friend Hamlet, the daughter of a theatre critic. The narrator of the novel, Hypergraphia, is a bit-part player in her ...”

“... amends the quasi-autobiography with good judgment and reasonable candour, but it relies heavily on self-revelation in the novels, and is rather short on concrete detail. R.L. Purdy’s invaluable Bibliographical Study (1954) gives far more than its name implies, and is packed with biographical information. And innumerable references to Hardy, pen-portraits and ...”

“... propaganda, it is hard to withdraw, or collapse with laughter at the vision of one’s own ghastly self. We are always re-educated, and very rarely re-educate ourselves. Certain themes in the life and work of Sigmund Freud, of the LSD prophet Timothy Leary, and of the more strident feminist authors, of whom Andrea Dworkin is undoubtedly one, give glimpses of ...”

“... you as a bit of a character. As newspapers become less important, however, journalists become more self-important, especially the ones that report from the front line of their own lifestyles. I don’t mind these delusions of grandeur. I like all the mythology. I like hearing of the bitches and the bastards. I’ve worked for some of them. I mean, what would a ...”

“... Encompassing’ or ‘Absolute Consciousness’ or Existenz (the mark of a non-objectifiable self, as opposed to mere existence, which allows man to be turned into an object for scientific inquiry) sit uneasily with the often ironic and cynical mindset of our age. Jaspers’s defence of ‘authentic’ human existence had already been powerfully ...”

“... light. The country comes across as a rough, small-minded, land-grabbing settler culture, based on self-serving fictions and violence, forever dogged by feelings of inferiority towards Europe and America. As one of the characters in his last novel, Theft (2006), concisely puts it, ‘We Australians are really shit. We know nothing. We are so bloody ...”

“... 1948. The wartime ideologue Ishiwara Kanji, called as a witness, argued against the tribunal’s self-serving mandate of investigating events only from 1928 onwards. The causes of the war should be sought, he argued, in the gunboat diplomacy of Commodore Matthew C. Perry in 1853. Perry’s demand that Japan open its doors to friendship with the United ...”

“... senses that Hugo is either a demon inhabiting a doll or the maverick half of Frere’s divided self. The second interpretation explains why Van Straaten will become involved with the police. It’s a mini-masterpiece of modern horror. Cavalcanti, a Brazilian who had joined Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios in 1940, also directed the Christmas party ...”

“... calls out Background! and hired New Yorkers begin to pass behind the perfect field, a little self-conscious, skaters and shoppers too slow to convince, so they try it again, Clarissa passing the sandblasted arch bound in its ring of chainlink, monument glowing grey against the grey. * A little less now in the world to love. Taxi on Bleecker, dim ...”

“... an alarming concentration of power – there was nothing innocent about the joke. Walpole’s self-promotion was a standard target, but Fielding’s sly participle gave a new twist to the usual complaint, and suggests how unlike a ministering angel an exponent of prime ministering might be. Yet there was also something distinctly ...”

“... The great experimental chemist of the previous generation, Joseph Priestley, had believed it self-evident that the progress of reason and science would lead to a general reformation of religion and politics: ‘The English hierarchy (if there be anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble even at an air pump, or an electrical ...”

“... suggests, of a marriage between Wilde and Tolstoy, a writer he revered. He was a compulsive self-publicist, but it was never without a generous dash of self-irony. ‘I find myself while still in middle life,’ he observed, ‘almost as legendary a person as the Flying Dutchman.’ This volume, rich in photos and ...”

“... down to see whether one of these sentences isn’t poking out of her side.’They’re also less self-enclosed than they appear. The surreal images in The Book of Words, and the monologue’s disjointed structure, eventually resolve with disturbing clarity: as an infant, the narrator was taken from her birth parents, who were ‘disappeared’ in a dirty war ...”