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“... 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 ...”

“... be a myriad modes of euphoria on display, while glumness would be unmasked as brittle, modish and self-indulgent. The only problem is that no publisher would touch it. Another Hegelian aesthetic which most modernism ditched was the kind of art in which personal relationships reflect deeper social forces. As the public sphere came to seem icily remote from ...”

“... to itself, he insisted, must produce the best of all possible worlds, since a capitalist pursuing self-interest makes life better for everyone. ‘The study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to society.’ He is ‘led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part ...”

“... distancing device which allowed him to dip back into Dublin was style. The novel’s elaborately self-conscious language helps to fend off the place at the same time as it brings it closer. Joyce immerses himself in his home town, but only as it is mediated by his all-sovereign art. We are never allowed to forget that this is a city made of words. Samuel ...”

“... lightning of divinity flickering around his locked, lobster-like claws seeks patiently to undo his self-defences. Thomas Mann’s Adrian Leverkühn, the damned hero of Doctor Faustus, chooses to study theology at university, determined to take the measure of the opposition. Like the saints, the wicked constitute a spiritual aristocracy, a privileged elite as ...”

“... it is in any sense one’s own. Hartman’s story is the story of someone who is almost uncannily self-reliant, who is strengthened by his own intellectual affinities, and not by the making of enemies; someone who is endlessly curious and confounded by what he finds himself depending on. What Hartman terms ‘the call of literature’ can sustain ‘both a ...”