“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”