“... 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 ...”

“... time with people I don’t really want to see,’ he writes, always a little charmed by his own self-contempt. At other times he admonishes himself to ‘make something out of the experience; discipline and train myself. Not run around to parties getting drunk and looking for “consolation”.’ But running round to parties and getting drunk is what he ...”

“... part of a trilogy with Sports (a transcription of the radio broadcast of a baseball game) and the self-explanatory The Weather. Traffic, and texts like it, represent a new frontier in poetic art. The most influential claims for the work of Goldsmith and his allies have come from Marjorie Perloff, a former president of the Modern Language Association and ...”

“... taste for the sublime is a greed like any other.’ But the occasional mockery she makes of her self-consciously self-forgetting absorptions seems mere stylistic dither and does not touch her essential seriousness. Though her reader may flip ahead, may put down the book and forget where she left off, may allow herself to ...”

“... as wholly and irrefutably obvious. A better title might have been How These Truths Became Self-Evident, because that is the problem that actually concerns her (she starts with Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence). As she notes, between 1689, when the Bill of Rights spoke only of the particular rights of Englishmen, and 1776, when Jefferson ...”

“... is part of what is meant by calling him ‘transcendent’), so the work of art is mysteriously self-generating and self-dependent, conjuring itself up miraculously out of sheer nothingness, obedient to no law but that of its own unique being. As a concrete universal, it is as much a coupling of sense and spirit, time and ...”

“... this a problem per se: ‘The fact that these teachers were women didn’t bother me or my self-conscious Freudian friends very much.’ She has a succession of boyfriends who paw at her in dark cinemas and on her parents’ sofa, and is only half aware that her friends enjoy having this done to them. She fixates on her English teacher, Miss ...”