“... Schwartz’s sense of his uniqueness had nothing in common with Lowell’s type of lordly self-belief, nor with the obsessive thirst for fame that motivated a poet like John Berryman. His literary career is often compared pityingly with their astute professionalism, as if, authentic poète maudit though he was, he never quite got the marketing ...”

“... of writers.’ Schaberg’s book is a deliberately narrow study, rich in its suggestiveness, self-indulgent in its minutiae, regrettable in its flaws. He is censorious of the few who made earlier attempts at this kind of reconstruction; he records their tiny errors, missing commas and the like. His own book, however, is marred by mistranslations, by ...”

“... If it has weaknesses, they are the product of its strength. It doesn’t always stop short of self-congratulation. One would have to feel very sure of the advantages of not-reading to dismiss as a ‘dull affair’ a magazine whose first issue included Lewis’s ‘Enemy of the Stars’ and whose second issue included Eliot’s ‘Preludes’. The ...”

“... as the Encyclopaedia Britannica put it in 1787. It was as protomodernists, ideal familiars of the self-conscious urban individual, that cats came into their own. To the avant-garde their aloofness seemed introspective; their sphinx-like calm and hieratic inscrutability (that capacity to shutter their vision which had struck others as sinister) was at one with ...”

“... or place comfortably in the context of contemporary British poetry, beyond the idiotic and self-marginalising labels of ‘outsider’ or ‘experimental’. A poem, Fisher said in an interview, ‘has business to exist … if there’s a reasonable chance that somebody may have his perceptions rearranged by having read it’. The poem exists as a ...”

“... time. Mourning the ‘death of Adam’, European intellectuals embraced a ‘less narcissistic’ self-image. Man no longer descended from the gods but instead emerged from beasts. In The Invention of Prehistory, Stefanos Geroulanos makes the opposite argument. Recognition of a past without people yielded a centuries-long ‘obsession’ with trying to find ...”

“... aesthetic and ethical disposition; violence, and in particular male violence against women; self-harm, especially but not exclusively women’s; and what she pointedly does not call masochism. ‘The mode of violence that gets beneath my skin and really haunts me is not those destructive acts perpetrated by one upon another, for reasons good, bad or ...”

“... bleakness, is it coolness, is it harshness? At a time when apparently everything is magnified by self-pity and the flinching or clamorous anticipation of pain, Li is entirely without. Things happen to her characters before they are ready, not after. The blade cuts into the flesh before there is the least outcry, and even then it will probably be bitten ...”

“... of the exotic.The appeal of this form of dress is evident in portraits of the period, including self-portraits, such as Constance Mayer’s near monochrome painting of 1799. Mayer’s simple, high-waisted dress is set off by the sombre browns and greys of the interior. Her melancholic pose – one hand to her head as she gazes out towards the viewer ...”

“... visible distillation, brandy-like, of the anima vagula blandula, the tenuous and transparent daily self that produced it. Another kind of good writing does not establish itself as involuntary personality, but as something the writer is just very, very good at doing. Such a dispossessed fluency seems available to everyone with a flair for catching a fashion. I ...”

“... taken on lightness, so humour is comedy that has lost its bodily weight ... It casts doubt on the self, on the world, and on the whole network of relationships that are at stake.’ In Tuten’s novel, doubt is cast both on the self and on the world from the minute Tintin and his companions, Snowy and Captain Haddock, leave ...”

“... unusual for him. He couldn’t move, he told me, without getting out of breath, but he was his old self: by which I mean that he had reverted to that youthful self which he preserved intact into middle age – something caught so well in Tony Quinton’s sweet and genial tribute (Spectator, 8 July). ‘My doctor has given me ...”

“... good man. By ‘good’, Canetti makes it clear, he means untainted by any trace of levity, self-interest or obeisance to fashion. Broch finally remembers Dr Sonne and suggests how the other can meet him. Canetti does so and is captivated. Henceforth he meets this hero of heroes for two hours every day in the Café Museum. They talk and talk – or ...”

“... Do we have ‘friends’, or do we just know various people? There is something a bit sticky and self-conscious about the idea of friendship. Anyone can be in love and proud of it, but to have a ‘friend’ – no, it really won’t do. ‘I’m your friend,’ said Myfanwy to John as they crouched in the ‘dark and furry cupboard while the rest played hide-and-seek ...”

“... and psycho-analytic thinkers such as Barthes, Kristeva and Lacan, his was a name of which no self-respecting British intellectual could afford to remain entirely ignorant – though his novels, so far as I can discover, were neither translated nor read. But as Sollers grew older he abandoned his youthful Maoism to become a worshipper of American ...”