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“... 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 ...”

“... at $1500 a month is ‘a real find’ even if you have to install the toilet and fixtures your-self. So for now Eleanor cooks, shops and cleans for Stash, walks his dog and deals with his moods; ‘sometimes I felt as if I were the sole member of the Bomb Squad: I had to defuse Stash.’ But it’s his apartment, and since the jewellery she makes ...”

“... Isabel is a thirty-something art history student, prim, gauche, improbably starry-eyed, impossibly self-obsessed, a junior version of the Anita Brookner wallflower (i.e. not yet prepared to consign herself to the sad margins of singlehood). But whereas the high-minded Brookner woman is given to maundering over Balzac or Flaubert, Isabel derives her vicarious ...”

“... stories, will be a match for him, but even she falls away in the face of his preening self-regard: ‘They didn’t know how lucky they were ... all the hairdressers he’d flirted with, all the travel agents, florists and girls in bars. When he was a famous, rich, literary-establishment figure living in Antibes or somewhere they would all realise ...”

“... which the new humanities men are so keen to discover unconscious traces in their predecessors. A self-made man of letters, Pritchett had none of the subsidies and privileges that post-war intellectuals came to expect the state and the university to shower on them. He found the Russian, French and Spanish masters for himself, and as a novelist and story ...”

“... compels the imagination is not likely to be our own: that past and place are founded, for our own self-preservation, on some variety of Larkin’s ‘forgotten boredom’. And only the best writers can deliberately reveal their own past as a foreign country, where things are differently done. I had not encountered the Tennessee novelist Peter Taylor ...”

“... Roberto Calasso is an Italian publisher who writes erudite works of non-fiction so elegantly self-indulgent they can be marketed as novels. He is working on a trilogy, or perhaps tetralogy, of which The Ruin of Kasch is the first part, and The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony (which preceded it in English translation) the second ...”

“... Berie Carr is smart, awkward, and passionately attached to her friend, Sils Chaussée, whose self-assurance and sexually mature body inspire Berie with an ardour that makes subsequent attachments seem feeble. Growing up in Horsehearts, New York, a fictional town so remote as to make Albany seem ‘glamorous, forbidding’, the two girls romp ...”

“... fall asleep’. Much of Fima’s behaviour – his deliberate failure at things and his virtuoso self-awareness – makes strategic sense. He chooses to aim low so as to pre-empt the possibility of genuine failure, preferring the fantasy of achievement to putting himself on the line. He perfects the role of clown for fear of being judged seriously, and his ...”

“... not methodologically sound. Its prose glittered meretriciously. Even worse, it was entertaining. Self-evidently, it was bad history. Believing that they knew what constituted correct and appropriate history, they could only respond to what they saw as deviance dismissively, to innovations from abroad with insular suspicion. As academic history contracts in ...”