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“... Safe as houses and translating freely, though completely lacking Heaney’s subtle self-recognitions, his response was lofty: ‘Comprehension.’ Then, perhaps aware of the self-serving in adequacy of the answer to someone he was using as informant/subject, he added: ‘and money.’ There was no possible ...”

“... Jessica has declined to help the Guinnesses with their book. It is hard not to moralise, in a self-righteous way, when confronted with the disastrous careers of the Fascist sisters, Unity and Diana. The Guinnesses are a solemn pair and have written a moralising book, from an extreme right-wing position. Jonathan Guinness has been chairman of the Monday ...”

“... Bertie Wooster would say, so the long day wore on, so to speak. Occasionally the text is in flat self-contradiction. Page 263 tells us that ‘Ireland was not a target’ for French invasion ‘in 1779’, but page 503 makes it clear that initially it was (although the author might, have added that ‘Edward Bancroft, the American diplomat’ suggested by ...”

“... Two original and accomplished works by Alasdair Gray, self-styled ‘Caledonian promover of intelligible sapience’, are published this month. Unlikely Stories, Mostly is copiously illustrated in a style which sometimes descends to coy greeting-card formalism – inanely grinning dogs, twinkling stars, nymphs with perfectly rounded breasts and perfectly circular nipples, muscular workers, a conquistador complete with Spanish moustache, an eastern scene composed of pointy pagodas ...”

“... nothing of real and permanent value. Cage was America’s best Dadaist, best Surrealist, best self-publicist, self-archivist, and its worst composer. He was a deeply playful and deluded man, whose project (he felt he had achieved it) was to ‘show the practicality of making works of art non-intentionally’, who ...”

“... remarkable,’ said the Telegraph of Out, and Punch thought that the author was so sure of her new self that she must belong to the school of Samuel Beckett. In Remake it’s this wise child she celebrates, and indeed she mischievously cites – from Jenny Diski writing in the London Review of Books, as it happens – a witty mock-theory about the ‘crucial ...”

“... not, in fact, own the ‘facts’ of his life, or of Plath’s: some of us might be said to be self-possessed, but none of us is in full possession of facts about ourselves beyond our reported date of birth, and – if we’re lucky – our parentage. In an essay in 1967 Hughes stated that ‘the struggle truly to possess his own experience, in other words ...”

“... wondering how to be true to herself, even (or perhaps especially) if she doesn’t quite have a self. AnnieLee lies about her past and says she doesn’t have a family. Sure, she’s got talent, but something is chasing her and giving her the fear, the reason, the drive. Even at this early stage in the narrative, you detect the clumsy fingers of a bad male ...”

“... by the civilised life.’ Maybe any such talk of ‘civilisation’ is liable to sound pompous and self-important, but the more we listen to ‘Uncle Wiz’, the more wistfully we recall his younger self who could be ‘silly like us’.Meeting the 50-year-old Auden, his undergraduate contemporary Richard Crossman ...”

“... Michael Fried, who is also a poet, has a dense, self-questioning, fervent prose style. Somewhat perversely he has, over the last three decades – that is, since his doctoral dissertation on Manet was printed as a special issue of Artforum in 1969 – put this prose to the service of art-historical scholarship. It might have been otherwise ...”

“... the evil – and, traditionally, the guilt – of rape is turned inward, but borne by some other self which is not the true self. She thinks that multiple-identity stories that deal not with splitting but with masquerading – having more than one self at one’s conscious disposal ...”

“... liking, that wasn’t reason to call them into question.’ She will admit to an inclination for self-abasement but true freedom must go beyond disgust for Catherine M. Disgust raises one ‘above prejudice’, breaking through taboos to the clear air of unmediated liberty. This is what she sees herself as primarily doing, but it is hard to read her account ...”

“... The penultimate victim, too, has a respectable idea of what’s coming to him, and a level of self-awareness unusual in an Indiana character. At the same time, however, Indiana feels the need to compensate for Warren’s death by introducing a clutch of thinly comic media gargoyles. In Resentment, where they had a bearing on plot and theme, such creatures ...”

“... smoking, I imagined ‘settling down’, not because I associated quitting with a more mature self-care, but because I couldn’t imagine moving through an array of social spaces without the cigarette as bridge or exit strategy. Soon after the scene in the museum comes the one moment in the book when Adam is genuinely moved by art. He is ...”

“... the threat of a violent outside. It was Cowper who declared, with something between innocence and self-accusation, that in his retreat (itself both a place achieved, and the act of retreating) ‘the sound of war/ Has lost its terrors ere it reaches me.’ Thus he records his strange kinship with those present-day authors who – like Don DeLillo – pose the ...”