“... both born commoners, crowned themselves Shah and ended up in exile, broken men – like that other self-crowned emperor, Napoleon. It seems now to have been forgotten that Reza Shah too was shunted around in exile, prevented from going where he wished to go. Forced off the throne by the Allies to secure access to Iranian oil during the Second World War, Reza ...”

“... of a bathroom cabinet. This is a corner of America in a mood of complacence ample enough to admit self-criticism, provoked in particular by the oil crisis and the queues at petrol stations. Flags are at half-mast for the hostages in Iran. God, who used to be present to Harry in his childhood, has withdrawn, ‘giving Harry the respect due from one well-off ...”

“... discredit Coleman’s evidence by drawing attention to his past unreliability. But the judge, Ed Self, a George W. Bush appointee, would hear none of it. The revelations of Coleman’s unfitness for the job, his debts, his violent temper, his racism, weren’t permitted as evidence. One by one, the defendants fell. Donnie Smith was sentenced to 12 years in ...”

“... him for many pages to come. Conversely, Call seemed hugely appealing as a young man, a model of self-control and integrity, perpetually annoyed by Gus. Over the course of the books, however, McMurtry slowly develops the friendship between the two, shifting the balance between the characters in the reader’s estimation. Gus is allowed to mature; he learns ...”

“... Marthe Robert is a well-known freelance among French Germanisten. She has written extensively on Freudian theory, on myth and Romanticism, and she collaborated with André Breton on a splendid volume of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms. She is deeply familiar with Kafka’s writings, having translated most of them into French: her knowledge of books on Kafka and the world he lived in is less impressive ...”

“... more characteristic trait of Mann’s writing, the reason Nabokov dismissed him as a pretentiously self-monumentalising nonentity. One scarcely thinks of playfulness in connection with Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain, and Joseph and His Brothers, whatever comic interludes it may include, tends to sink under the weight of its narrative detail and its ...”

“... it’s inextricably linked with Oskar’s human failings. His goodness seems inseparable from his self-indulgence, his appetites for cognac and women, his skill at black-marketeering, his talent for not merely cultivating but actually enjoying the company of the murderous Plaszow camp commandant – ‘drinking with the devil’: ‘He’s always been a man ...”

“... conscription of long-dead people into our own causes; and, worst of all, our pharisaical self-satisfaction at always being historically on the right side. Thus we adopt towards past people, our poor relations, an attitude of pity tinged with contempt, reserving praise for those ‘ahead of their time’ who, we think, were striving to be more like ...”

“... If Robert Lowell had not been a Lowell would he ever have had the confidence to write the poems he did? It is impossible to imagine the scion of a distinguished English family using that family now as a basis for poetic composition. But all Lowell’s poems are about being a Lowell, or rather, more specifically, about being this Lowell ...”

“... a narrator with Less than Zero, along with several other characters, a distinctive and highly self-conscious prose style, a time of year, and a milieu of urban self-abuse and disaffection. But there is nothing straightforward about the relationship between the books. I’m glad to have the connection made for ...”

“... your pocket, keep it open. Diminish the haft affix loosely proponent span blood group indexical self-cut. Try doing it now. That final phrase is overtly sarcastic, but not without ambiguity: the urgency of the attempt and its utter impossibility and self-deception are precisely suspended. The stanza as a whole segues even ...”

“... dir.’ As in most elegies, not least those in which men elegise their lovers, there is something self-regarding here. We learn considerably less about the dead woman than we learn about Douglas Dunn’s dead wife in his 1985 Elegies. Some readers may find it odd that the poem ends with the dead woman comforting the grieving husband; except that the German ...”

“... a tense, difficult relationship between two human beings who are aware of shifting senses of the self and capable of both love and hate – very like, in fact, what we hear of affairs and their sudden revulsions of feeling in Doris Lessing’s more realistic novels. Well, if it doesn’t fit, so much the worse for the fable. What would have been proved by a ...”

“... Pratt’s own story to recede and the novel to turn in on itself: so much is it concerned with the self-contained world of images in themselves that all reality runs out of it – the case of a novel taken over by its subject. The Mosquito Coast has the pattern of a marvellous journey round a country and a character: but it’s not a myth, a fable or a ...”

“... the fourth fragment, I’m tempted to answer that the voice is that of Walt Whitman, the great self-styled ‘bard’ who classed Ossian with the Bible, and who thought that Red Jacket, one of the great Iroquois orators, was ‘like one of Ossian’s ghosts’. Whitman grew his long lines out of Macpherson’s cadenced prose. A multitude of European and ...”