“... invented by another of his great heroes, Raymond Roussel. Perec’s obsession with autistic, self-propagating literary forms of this kind, which implicitly reject all preconceptions of depth and significance, is wholly compatible with Post-Modernism’s ideal of literature as a self-reflexive surface, a field of clues ...”

“... suicides. It is likely that many of the victims also imitated the incompetence of Werther’s self-slaughter – an act worthier of the Three Stooges than of a latter-day Hamlet. The clock strikes twelve and with the forlorn cry ‘Lotte! Lotte! Farewell! Farewell!’ Goethe’s romantic hero shoots himself in the head. Six hours later a servant comes in ...”

“... values, aiming for success in conventional terms and for the most part achieving it. Low self-esteem and a dependent eagerness to please are probably the most important single characteristics. Typically a bulimarexic is anxious, lonely and a perfectionist. The Whites have an explanation – but only one: men. Fathers, husbands, brothers, lovers: once ...”

“... current political events, though his argument is spoiled when he goes on to say that Althusser’s self-criticism is a ‘commercial strategy ... marketed by the engineers of the planned obsolescence of thought’. Hobsbawm, in his chapter on ‘Marx, Engels and Politics’ in The History of Marxism, shows that the founders themselves were quite opportunistic ...”

“... the discomforts attendant on what W. Jackson Bate has termed ‘the remorseless deepening of self-consciousness before the rich and intimidating legacy of the past’ through the simple expedient of ignoring the past. What then deepens is another sort of self-consciousness, and it is sad to think of people as ...”

“... themselves to ‘my research’ than to ‘our research’. The work has largely been done by self-effacing individuals who do not appear on the volumes’ title pages but get their obscure billing in the cluttered text of the preface. Nor was their work mere catalogue drudgery. Most of the journals carried unsigned articles, and the task of cracking the ...”

“... As for so many generations of radicals, politics was their open university, their route to ‘self-development’. Annie Kenney, a mill-girl from Oldham who was more or less adopted by Emmeline Pankhurst, remembered recruiting for the WSPU in Pennine moorland and villages where women were ‘versed in Labour politics’: ‘The lamp would be burning, and ...”

“... astonishingly prolific and conversationally predatory Fuller was well known even among America’s self-examining Transcendentalists for what her closest ally in the movement, Ralph Waldo Emerson, called her ‘mountainous me’. Before she left the United States when she was 36 for a tour of England and the Continent, where she would seek out ...”

“... increased antisemitism and an exodus of Israel’s educated elite. The Israeli state performs its self-defeating operations under the sign of Jewish ‘safety’, and for that reason with the widespread approval of Jews in Israel and much of the global diaspora. Denials of the reality of genocide mask a deeper, libidinal investment in its perpetration. In ...”

“... book is fastidious about segregating Yiddish and vernacular American speech from the narrator’s self-consciously literary English, which even uses British rather than American spelling. In an essay published in 1990, Hana Wirth-Nesher argued that David experiences the English language as ‘a foreign culture inhabiting his psyche. Whether he desires it or ...”

“... situations; others appear in one story and are never seen again. At the same time, each story is a self-sufficient unit: it really is a story, rather than a chapter in a Modernist novel. As the stories of Superboy and Superbaby are introduced only retrospectively, so Babel followed the Red Cavalry cycle with a Childhood cycle, set in Odessa in the early ...”

“... inner world of another person.) Mark Ford is alive to the idiosyncratic nature of Roussel’s ‘self-evident uniqueness’ and ‘unassailable self-referentiality’, just as he is aware of the dangers of seeking to contextualise or even to ‘understand’ Roussel’s work, rendering it less freakish or more explicable ...”

“... ever in a purer element Found ready welcome. And after sixty or more lines of accusation and of self-accusation Wordworth turns away with the suggestion of something still unrevealed:                          Time may come When some dramatic Story may afford Shapes livelier to convey to thee, my Friend, What then I learn’d, or ...”

“... and those who are denied this privilege by white gatekeepers are notoriously prickly. Coates, a self-made writer, is particularly vulnerable to the charge that he is popular among white liberals since he assuages their guilt about racism. He doesn’t have a perch in academia, where most prominent African-American intellectuals have found a stable home. Nor ...”

“... in place in the opening chapters: he has ‘a suspicious nature’; he is ‘distrustful, distant, self-absorbed’; he is ‘a master of self-exculpation’. In two sentences in Chapter 5 his whole life is laid before us, though he has yet to reach his 30th year: ‘Keeping himself free from encumbrance’ (with a first ...”