“... equates this scenario – the New Woman as ‘predator, rebel and neurotic’, dominating a ‘self-doubting New Man, whose very passivity makes his heroism problematic’ – with the male response to feminism, and the creation of a male protagonist who is both ‘passive and exemplary’ is his touchstone of male sexual vision. When he is considering ...”

“... just to accept but to respect – comes back from the brink of death to be his old death-dealing self. Within the delicate predatory network of the book we are to tremble back along the lines to an earlier exchange of curbed hostilities, no less banal and no less desolately oppressive but the other way round, when Peter earlier went upstairs to his father ...”

“... serious interest in Ireland. In the meantime, however, the United Irishmen were pushed back into self-reliance, manifested in Robert Emmet’s attempted insurrection of 1803. Elliott gives this as much space as Hoche’s expedition, though it had no concrete connection with France. Like the rest of her book, apart from broad-ranging introductory and ...”

“... it. Not even Oscar Wilde assumed the name, Who called himself both genius and poet. That he was self-appointed to his fame – A true wit wouldn’t hint it, much less crow it. Poor knackered Nicky thinks he’s Alan Coren: He’s just a wee laird with a twitching sporran. And yet it’s wise to give conceit expression – Within the limits set by the ...”

“... a dog, and try to combine them into a big class of their own, the class of classes that are not self-members: then you have the result that this class is a member of itself only if it is not and is not only if it is. Contradiction! Red alert! The concept of a class reveals itself as intrinsically paradoxical, hardly a solid basis for mathematical ...”

“... explained in terms which are, to say the least, peculiar. Thus Nellie Macmillan stifled the True Self which she might have allowed her son to develop, and provoked him to construct a False Self as a protective mechanism. The compliance he showed her, as the price for her reciprocal semblance of love, ‘was the earliest ...”

“... the Ulster News I feel a voyeur, a political tourist. It’s then, for whatever reason – self-disgust, self-consciousness, that guilty intermittent sense of whatever breathing down your neck – it’s then when you’re in company that you start to stir things and the late-night arguments begin. A gaggle of ...”

“... their ‘secret wounds, their isolation and their irony, and above all their lightly masochistic self-irony’, are companions of those of Svevo, Pessoa and Kafka. And in an even more striking formulation, Saer says these characters have ‘a distant kinship with certain heroes of Dostoevsky’ because of ‘a particular sensibility to vileness, their own or ...”

“... Will Self would have us believe that a volume of Saki’s stories, chosen from eight miles of second-hand books in a New York store, saved his life. That, he says in his introduction to this collection, should not be confused with changing his life. Faced with a 22-city promotional tour of America for one of his books (‘Not, you might venture, a deathly predicament in and of itself – but how wrong you are’), he was able to set against the ‘terrifying rootlessness’ of the tour the ‘triumphantly rooted character’ of Saki’s stories ...”

“... biographer no end of clues to a wayward, drink-sodden, chaos-creating life. And the disordered, self and other-destructive life offers all manner of interpretations of the fiction. Nancy Schoenberger is not interested in literary criticism; Blackwood’s books are discussed entirely with reference to the life. To do this is to demean a writer, I would have ...”

“... interchangeable they share an underlying resignation, as if the low expectations and rueful self-knowledge of late middle age had permeated the psyche of a whole group, whether asleep, awake or on the borderline (‘dreamlike waking experiences’ are counted here as dreams). There are also various ‘stories’ and one ‘rant’ drawn from ...”

“... clanging vulgarity, corny clichés, cutenesses’, and poured scorn on ‘the intolerable self-indulgence of his tear-jerking, bourgeois sentimentality’. On the other hand, in recent years Jarrell’s concern for the helpless or voiceless or overlooked has elicited from critics such as Stephen Burt and Langdon Hammer and James Longenbach favourable ...”

“... and reality, its mixture of rebelliousness and awe at authority, its blending of submission and self-assertion. Like the Brontës, children can be passionate and impulsive, but they also crave a certain discipline and appreciate the need for order. If they can be anarchic, they can also be brutally authoritarian. They like to know who is in charge, even if ...”

“... insignificant bombing of Montmartre. But it’s in Normance that Céline first hits on this self-image: ‘I’m just a chronicler, that’s all! … all I have is a little talent for chronicling … it’s nothing but a mishmash? fine! but since it’s direct experience, what counts most is the chronicler’s integrity!’ And yet it isn’t clear what ...”

“... to be doing in the portrait; and that in posing before the painter he or she was projecting the self-representation [he or she wanted to aim] at future observers. This is how a sitter staged herself (says a portrait, according to Berger), and then how she responded, easily or uneasily, to the sight of what the painter had begun to do with the staging. And ...”