“... events both world-historical and interpersonal (perhaps at the same time) etc. This ironic self-examination puts the protagonist somewhere between @laurenoyler (the character’s description of her Twitter avatar matches the author’s profile pic) and Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces (although she’d hate to be compared to him). She ...”

“... Boxing, she points out, is as much about losing as winning. Even the best careers are brief, self-destructive and likely to end in humiliation rather than triumph. Every fight pivots on a ‘moment of visceral horror … when one boxer loses control, cannot maintain his defence, begins to waver, falter, fall back, rock with his opponent’s punches ...”

“... was taking up much of her time. These early stories, often heavily autobiographical, show her self-conscious, aspiring, fascinated with great or striking women – her male narrators, like her male pseudonyms, allowing her to write freely on female character and appearance – and hating conventional femininity. She moved on from journalism to translating ...”

“... movement of a sentence, whose grammatical structure allows us to be both inside and outside a self-contained scene, a dramatic vignette with extension in time (‘and there were moments’) and space (the reflection in the mirror above the mantelpiece). Like a painting by Renoir or Manet, this scene invites limitless speculation about the novels that ...”

“... comparable vocabularies and linked concerns whether his immediate subject is the developing self or the revolutions of society. Geoffrey Hartman has been probably the most eminent commentator on Wordsworth since the publication in 1964 of his important and influential Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787-1814. The Unremarkable Wordsworth collects 14 essays ...”

“... that motivate human beings. Liberalism is an ideal that has triumphed, and it is central to the self-identity of America. Americans can, therefore, feel confident in the future whilst they hold to the ideals of democracy and the free market. No wonder ‘Endism’ has gone down so well: it has provided a sophisticated rationale for the commonplaces of ...”

“... was humanly as dead as mutton. This being the case, Africans were clearly without a capacity for self-development, and it was to remedy this otherwise fatal deficiency that the great colonial mission was really for. So it was said from lectern and pulpit, and so it continued to be said. Despite the democratic upheavals forecast for colonics in the Second ...”

“... motor normality. Now he could keep a job and not upset his friends, but he felt that his tic-free self was less exciting than his old Tourettic self; he had from an early age built his life and personality around his affliction. The solution was to take Haldol during the working week but go cold turkey at the weekend, thus ...”

“... to be explicitly asked for and there was no real hope of returning it. What was left of Ghali’s self-esteem sank lower and lower. That he felt his financial position to be degrading, that till the end he wished to be the ‘vrai gentleman’ he had been taught he should be, can be seen from the meticulous accounts he kept and his expressed last wish that ...”

“... for it in different ways. Because we cannot help having dissimilar beliefs and desires, it was self-evident that nature and nature’s God meant us to pursue our happiness in our own, unique manner. That was the reason for our inalienable right to search or not to search for our salvation here or hereafter as we saw fit. There was much confidence in the ...”

“... ends with the title-poem, a long meditation which readers may want to compare with Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in an Convex Mirror’ and ‘Fantasia on “The Nut-Brown Maid” ’. The origin of ‘A Wave’ may be the passage about dreams in ‘Self-Portrait’: ‘They seemed strange because we couldn’t actually see ...”

“... What Pritchard offers us, in place of Thompson’s overdrawn portrait of an irremediably self-involved man, is an impressionist sketch of a somewhat more human, intermittently affectionate, yet disconcertingly feckless, husband and father. The behaviour Thompson depicts as chilling careerism Pritchard treats as the charming insouciance of a truly ...”

“... The Pebbled Shore will disappoint those who hope to learn of tensions caused by Lord Longford’s self-imposed missions to Myra Hindley and ‘Reg and Ron’ (as the Krays are referred to in his books), by the great anti-pornography campaign or by the advent of Harold Pinter into the fold. The book ends in the mid-Sixties, just as the author, in full literary ...”

“... forming intricate and often fragile patterns of stabilising relationships. She is sure that self-interest, be it in the form favoured by Hobbes or by today’s rational choice theory, won’t do. Naturally there can be some meeting of minds out of pure self-interest, as in a fiercely controlled structure like a ...”

“... see – with the depth and passion of his earnest glance – the real nature of his gifts, of his self, and of his truest material, has become able to transmute his very misunderstandings into art of a crystalline honesty. The Enigma of Arrival newly constitutes Naipaul’s claim to be, as a novelist and critic of societies, the most important import since ...”