“... a strange antitype, a funhouse distortion, of his inventor. He is Jewish and costive rather than self-consciously WASP and Trollopianly fluent, but over the years he has had his bookish successes, including a bestseller, and more than what, in the old days, would have been thought his fair share of women. The titles and dates of his works and conquests are ...”

“... nowhere the stuff that either issued from the hand of God or grew out of what Darwin called the ‘self-developing energies’ of the cosmos. Many of his examples are valid. Most of the moors were not, before people arrived, tracts of bents and heather and bog-cotton: they were jungles of broad-leaved trees and conifers. Valley bottoms in the American sierras ...”

“... Thetis, the mythical self-transforming nereid, could be the shape-shifting guiding presence behind these three books. Carol Ann Duffy and Jo Shapcott write poems about her, or more exactly through her, while transformation and metamorphosis, travel through time, space and states of being lie at the core of Gwyneth Lewis’s second English-language collection, Zero Gravity (her mother tongue is Welsh ...”

“... holding onto vine-stems. The climb got easier. As he got to the bare top he felt a surge of self-confidence, but nearly fell down a rocky cleft. He was terrified again. He entered a rural hut, hand in hand with a young boy in an ash-coloured suit. He described the dream variously in various tellings, but no more than anyone would. He concluded that it ...”

“... devotes considerable space to assuring us that attributing blame in Sri Lanka is not easy. And to self-conscious questioning of Westerners’ right to comment. ‘Go home. Write a book. Hit the circuit,’ Gamini tells Anil at one point. The sudden winding up of the main story is followed by two sequences. The first is a clear-eyed, slow-motion account of a ...”

“... it, particularly in the matter of evidence. Sometimes the sources cited are obviously tainted and self-serving, with partisan speeches and Communist newspapers quoted to illustrate alleged misdemeanours on the part of the authorities. Surely people weren’t imprisoned only for telling policemen that they could be doing something better with their time? And ...”

“... by his exhibitionist companion or eager to be ‘as free as tumble weed’, Richardson’s self-portrait is calculated to appeal to his readers. Only at one moment is he less circumspect. Intent on making the cosmetics tycoon Helena Rubinstein, known as ‘Madame’, grotesquely funny as she fails to resist the ‘fresh green smell of newly minted ...”

“... onto the ‘magnificently eventful’ sea. This is a long book, in some respects rather superbly self-indulgent. It has a curious structure: Raban’s voyage has a sort of ghostly double, the voyage of Discovery, commanded by Captain Vancouver, which sailed from Falmouth in April 1791. Discovery proceeded via Cape Town, Australia and New Zealand, Tahiti and ...”

“... will work honestley for a small wage.” “I can make good furnisher.” ’ This loss of self-sufficiency has always been the Afrikaner’s worst nightmare. The Poor Whites are not well represented in South African fiction – outside the Afrikaans novel, that is. In the Thirties several Afrikaner writers wrote poignantly about the armblanke and ...”

“... The characters and the sentences themselves are best forgotten. If it wasn’t for his self-aggrandising tendencies (and his unpleasant, reductive stereotypes) he would probably just be accepted as a bracing broad-brush satirist, a set-piece artist with a terrific ear. Perhaps it’s not literature, in the Tolstoy or Dickens sense, but it’s not ...”

“... a day, never fewer – though she keeps her work to herself. The novel is an examination of her self-enclosed life, from the inside. Every page is a network of the allusions, quotations and references that bind her thinking into coherence, if not into sense. There isn’t much she hasn’t read, or doesn’t remember. Oscar Wilde, the Brontës, Robert Louis ...”

“... from a persistent fear that its citizens might be simulating their loyalties. There is something self-perpetuating about this kind of paranoia and the struggle to eradicate its legacy continues to this day. Fitzpatrick’s concept of imposture could be used as a way of examining not only Soviet society but also the Soviet regime: a regime obsessed not only ...”

“... his function as ‘the judge’, and now elderly and retired – has been locked into brutalising self-disgust since his years at Cambridge long ago. There, he ‘learned to take refuge in the third person and to keep everyone at bay’; now, he beats his cook as he used to beat his wife. Biju, the cook’s son, is an illegal immigrant working in New York ...”

“... conceived as a simple refuge from history, but an ordered, serene nature, secluded from its wilder self. Wars and gardens are both natural as well as historical phenomena (or are experienced as such), but perhaps, Helphand suggests, rehearsing the frail hopes of his gardening subjects, there is another, consoling, nature – and thus, maybe, another history ...”

“... on an anguished debate about the possibility of maintaining one’s integrity in a corrupt, self-seeking society that demands lies and collusion. Written in exile, these books were strongly anti-Fascist in tone, and, when translated, contributed to making Mussolini’s regime less popular abroad in the mid-1930s than it had been ten years ...”