“... an Eliot, however complex a matter, does not depend directly on their ‘views’, or upon their self-appointed role in society. Their legend is personal, not exemplary, and their achievement as poets is not a sort of holy collaboration with the national soul, a struggle requiring the poet to present himself as both prophet and sacrifice. And of course they ...”

“... of media, and in her lifetime was known as a writer, she is now remembered for her photographic self-portraits, mainly taken in the 1920s, which stage her in various personae (aviator, buddha, doll, angel). She never had an exhibition of photographs in her lifetime, and they hardly circulated. Thomson’s narrator is Schwob/Cahun’s life partner, Suzanne ...”

“... grandparents, in whose eyes Lennon had blown it by becoming the person he is in this interview: self-engrossed, witty, malicious, foolish – someone who is always ready to be disabused and reabused, obstinately drawn to contending kinds of ruin, aloft between frying pan and fire and flipping like a dervish pancake, yet equally convinced of a redemptive ...”

“... L’Étudiant noir in which he railed against assimilation as a route towards emancipation: the self-hatred and cowardice at the heart of ‘assimilation’ would never, he wrote, lead to true freedom for Black people under colonial rule. In Return to My Native Land, Césaire coined the term ‘négritude’ – broadly, ‘Blackness’ or ...”

“... the demoniacal, incestuous, lying, counterfeiting, fascist Freud’ – caricatures intended to self-destruct on being read. She lays out a stall of biographical red herrings and holds each one up for our inspection. She finds a form of life-writing a bit like wild analysis: the theories are summarily paraphrased, case histories are scrambled in the ...”

“... Jewish history, Zionism, the literature of the Holocaust. He has discovered new contexts for his self-interpretation, from Midrash to Yale Comp Lit. And as always, what he is saying is suggestive and elusive, as irritating as it is arousing. His descant about a Diasporist art seems at one minute to be describing a universal condition and, at the next, the ...”

“... as his structural principle. Philosophers’ questions lead to questions answered by questions; self-questionings lead on to closure by question, and that, in turn, to the ubi sunt motif and its troping by Spenser. En route, there are many Menippean delights, and much ostranenie, or defamiliarising freshness, in Hollander’s imitatively ...”

“... did it, but only because I was ambushed by some stranger hiding in my personality, some other self I wasn’t prepared to meet.’ By Gothic I mean that moment in a fiction when all the emotions go underground, when what seemed like a logical, if extravagant plot turns to nightmare, driven by forces that no one will name. The corpse, for instance, already ...”

“... to be in both poems and stories, in so far as he is able to isolate it, is not unity, however, but self-division; not completeness but a kind of provisionality; not the power of self-explanation but a refusal to make explicit what is at the heart of the work. The finest short stories, he argues, are peculiarly concerned with ...”

“... inspiring schoolteacher, but his shyness stayed for a good deal of his adult life, and he remained self-effacing, with a tendency to smile at himself and the Gaelic culture which was crucial to him. Crichton Smith had a liking for Chinese restaurants, and wrote a number of poems (which he enjoyed delivering at readings) on Chinese themes. In one a couple ...”

“... and, of course, repression. I wasn’t there, and I’m glad I wasn’t. But there is nothing self-important about their earnestness, nor their nostalgia, and they take pains to justify the relevance of popular culture to academic study. In a section called ‘Keith Sculle’s World of Eating Out’, Sculle describes getting to know Chicago through its ...”

“... the prey of one’s own presumptuous energy.’ The play of this syntax has about it an untiring self-consciousness that is positively Jamesian. The ‘one’ who speaks does so on behalf of the generality of poets, is any poet. Yet he is also a particular poet. And for that poet to claim anything ‘darkly and impetuously’ is at one and the same time to ...”

“... from the human norm. ‘Foolish girl that I was,’ she cries out again when she considers her self-will and her passions. Looking back on her failure to be anything more than a deviant, she eventually elects to see herself as nothing less than a damned soul – damnation is a kind of fame – and mysteriously speaks at the end of her story of being ...”

“... body of verse he has produced in between there are a good many poems tinctured by the same kind of self-justifying self-deprecation. He very soon ceased to make tremendous statements, preferring on the whole to notice whatever seems to deserve that favourite epithet ‘odd’, and to meditate on the trouvaille. The Middle of ...”

“... playwright, soon-to-be-failed gossip columnist (he had a brief career on the Mail on Sunday) and self-proclaimed former brothel-keeper. From then on, it was clear that the spoof was not going to work again. There followed opus three, Henry Root’s World of Knowledge, in which the retired wet fish tycoon switched genres from belles lettres to reference. This ...”