“... surface, the dichotomy pointed to by Mencken. One a British peer of ancient lineage, the other a self-made man who, through investing skill and fanatical diligence, became the richest of all Americans, in ‘essential character’ they were poles apart. True, they had certain obvious things in common: each had many marriages (four for Bend’Or, five for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a rosy reflection of all whom we care for enough, the Other rendered perfect in a paradise of our self-love. If MacSweeney’s poem takes its measure from The Infant and the Pearl, it’s nonetheless a more desperate work, cutting away to contemporary horrors with intent to shock. In ‘Cavalry at Calvary’, written to the Guardian journalist Maggie ...”

“... the duty of ethical probity that goes with it. The deconstructionist, more often than not, is a self-conscious outlaw. Thomas Docherty in On Modern Authority takes up the pose of the Noble Robber and gleefully uncovers an etymological affinity between criticism and crime. His aim is to redistribute textual power and authority to the dispossessed ‘readers ...”

“... our thoughts are trapped in hand-me-down forms and even the act of investigating and naming the self is both arbitrary and suspect. A lost language would mean a misplaced self; and indeed, Aron has caught a fleeting and provocative glimpse of a shadow father behind the father he knows, a lithe and animated Papa who is ...”

“... privilege to Labour’s traditional constituency, the overarching concept of ‘community’, a self-evidently inclusive idea which is almost incompatible with class or social conflict – all are generated by a rhetoric of social harmony and commonality of interest and endeavour. This is a bold and admirable enterprise plainly worth trying. Were this a ...”

“... in terms. Davenport-Hines sees the Post-Modern as the latest resurgence of Gothic – a self-confirming case to some extent, since he tends to read the latter in terms of the former. But he has a point even so. The speech of American youth – weird, gross, bizarre, wicked, scary – is certainly the discourse of Gothic, which before Modernism ...”

“... is, or was (maybe it has pretty much gone out in our post-Wolfenden days), an acting-out of self-hatred or desperate self-mockery. The thought occurred to me recently on seeing a production of Vanbrugh’s The Relapse at the National Theatre. The actor playing Lord Foppington, the madly vain ‘man of fashion’, was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... signal. Michael hits the booze a little harder and begins to regret his contempt for the ‘self-conscious libertines’ of his vitalist canon: ‘If what he thought and said mattered, he would have to re-examine everything now.’ Enter Lara Purcell, a glamorous, cosmopolitan political scientist. Lara is from the Windward Islands, exotic and ...”

“... policy belongs to a world of morality and high-mindedness: it is determined by realpolitik, self-interest and imperial ambition. Indeed, he declares that all these various adventures – Bosnia and Kosovo as much as Afghanistan – are part of America’s imperial project. He accepts that Bosnia remains in a mess, with no end in sight; he admits that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”