“... talk about Kafka, the man and the work, without falling either into the Brod-Muir trap or into the self-destructiveness of the Heller approach. There was a whole world waiting to be explored, and one which could be explored with humanity and patience: the world of his relations with people, with his background, with his art. A new, much more varied Kafka was ...”

“... deal of interest in the techniques of Modernism and theories that would see a work of fiction as a self-contained system of signs, it is curious that they should have settled so contentedly for the traditional chronicle. But so it is: for better or worse the world is still there, even if the French refuse to speak to it, and it is harder to escape from than ...”

“... Distinctly impressive, however, are the brisk, dispassionate responses to people met, untouched by self-regard, and the sharp observation of the contents of the palace of the Maharajah of Benares and, in particular, the McNab-like accounts, neither squeamish nor morbid, of the burning of corpses on the ghats: ‘The outside bits tended to burn least ...”

“... repulsive, ludicrous, and central, as if his author had conceived him in a caricaturing passion of self-dismay, finding a paradoxical relief in the process. If that were so, it would shed a further sad light on Toole’s despair that this comedy of release could find no route to anyone’s laughter. Publication was eventually secured by the unremitting ...”

“... Refuses’, is the most vivid and absorbing part of Novel with Cocaine, because Maslennikov’s self-castigation has not yet become obsessive; most of his attention here is devoted to the quirky personalities of his schoolmates, all of whom are more engaging than Maslennikov himself. He moves on from them into a pointless affair with an older woman and ...”

“... the lowliest: these bugs tonight like high-roast coffee beans that fling themselves at flames and self-destruct, that blue wasp juicing bugs like tangerines, fat bucking locusts jockeyed on and sucked, these trawling spiders that have rigged their nets halfway between our porchlamps and the night, their dawn webs threaded with dew jewelettes and hauls of ...”

“... thrill. At Elland Road fans chanted ‘Ripper 12 Police Nil.’ Lasses took up karate, Judo an self-defence, An jeered at lads in porn shops, An scrawled stuff in pub Gents, Like: ‘Ripper’s not a psychopath But every man in pants. All you blokes would kill like him Given half a chance. ‘Listen to your beer-talk – “Hammer”, “poke” and ...”

“... narrative, in which the adult forgoes the temptation to spell out what was unclear to his young self. Everything in the story seems merely contingent and circumstantial until the black convicts are introduced – when, like magnets, they gather every detail of the tale and point up its shape. Like the best fiction, everything in Time and Time Again is ...”

“... with a number of engaging lunacies. Consider the conjecture that Heraclitus’s ‘great feat of self-expression in prose and in philosophy’ was not equalled until Montaigne published his Essays. Or better, relish the suggestion that lyric poetry ‘for all we know to the contrary may be prehuman’. And some may find equally charming the more frequent ...”

“... journalists working their arses off behind the wire getting the paper out are becoming sick of the self-appointed consciences of the Sunday Times sitting in the Gray’s Inn Road. At lunchtime two-thirds of the refuseniks leave for Wapping amid handshakes, hugs and tears. I decide that I need the weekend to think about the future. Virtually everyone I care ...”

“... it was also a principle or device that he worked very hard in his own life. The Shavian trick of self-praise is the most obvious instance. But it also has a close inverse relationship to his habit of stealing his adversaries’ clothes: for instance, utterly refusing to quarrel with them, and ingeniously explaining to them that their claim to dislike him is ...”

“... from time to time the writer becomes aware of the fact he may be tempted to over-compensate with self-conscious bursts of local colour. This is the trap into which Joseph Hone has fallen in his Children of the Country. He has some excuse, perhaps, in that he was frustrated in his original purpose, which was to cross the African continent from the Indian ...”

“... was a smug, snuff-coloured little prig. East Coast journalists used to take Mark Twain at his own self-performed value too, referring to him as ‘the wild humorist of the Pacific slope’. It’s as though the metropolitan finds it difficult to think of a man from the provinces – from further ‘west’ – as anything other than what he claims to be, as ...”

“... then it is no great further step to say that when the filament snaps the balloon is still self-sufficient.’ A couple of months after offering these speculations at the prompting of his sons’ experience, Doyle declares in Light that they have resulted in his receiving ‘a mass of definite testimony’ of a confirmatory character. ‘The instances ...”

“... and the international Communist movement in the Khrushchev period. Even allowing for the totally self-justifying character of Hoxha’s accounts of disputes with other leaders and his hostile, indeed paranoid portrayal of Soviet motives and actions, it is clear that Stalin’s successors saw little need to persuade anyone of the necessity of their policies ...”