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“... 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 ...”

“... he remarked at the time to an analyst friend, with an odd note of admiration and possibly self-recognition. Like Huston, he began to see Freud’s discovery of the unconscious as a highly cinematic descent into hell. They even agreed on the incredible proposition that the imaginary young patient – Cecily – should be played by Marilyn ...”

“... to morality are for that reason clearer and more cogent. So-called personality is a matter of self-interest: bees in a hive have no moral problems. Examining their own world and using their own vocabulary, empirical and linguistic philosophers quite naturally and rightly come to such conclusions. Hume could perceive only a bundle of sensations, and Parfit ...”

“... blueprint for a regenerated society, and what Shelley is concerned about here is the tactics of self-preservation in an obstinately unregenerated society ... It may be objected that Prometheus plans to retire from a regenerated world, but the point there is that Prometheus and Asia have no business in such a world, for they are immortals. Prometheus’ job ...”

“... reform. The Thirties attitude was at once more political and less so. This was the period when self-consciously progressive intellectuals, many of them decidedly unpolitical in the traditional sense, were driven by guilt and romantic despair to join the Communist Party. They felt not merely uncomfortable about the existence of poverty, but personally ...”

“... industrial change in which we are now caught up. This is why trade unions in Britain require self-reform, and a new role. Was it not Sir Thomas More who predicted in the 16th century that if the Catholic Church did not reform itself from within it would be reformed from without? And so it was. One of my proud possessions is a copy of the history of the ...”