“... in 2008. Richard was written as an extended internal dialogue, with the voice of Edwards’s saner self interspersed with long italicised sections signalling the intrusion of darker thoughts. The plot was constrained by the known facts of Edwards’s life, but Myers did allow himself to imagine the guitarist’s death as an epiphanic moment on a hillside next ...”

“... that of Suckling or Herrick. Rochester’s is the voice of a man grown so familiar with his own self-destructiveness that it causes him no surprise. The very unstrained quality of his style makes his honesty the more chilling.’ The contribution by the editor of the volume begins with a consideration of the difficulty in distinguishing Rochester’s poems ...”

“... mostly within the justice system, between police stations, prisons and courtrooms. The system is self-contained and unaccountable: graduates of the Police Academy are automatically granted a law degree and can move fluidly from police station to prosecutor’s office to judge’s bench. It is inconsistent and unpredictable: judges hand down idiosyncratic ...”

“... dries you up, or it makes you think you are infallible, or your writing becomes puffed out with self-esteem. (Victor Hugo thought himself superior to both Jesus and Shakespeare.) It is a complication that the imagination can well do without.’ It is the spring of 1993. Gunn is on the list of those who will read at a literary festival in a huge old market ...”

“... degree on victimhood at the hands of other countries, China is none too keen to fess up to its self-mutilations. There are no museums or memorials dedicated to the Cultural Revolution and the Great Famine – together the cause of more than thirty million deaths – and academic or artistic work must follow the Party line precisely. Chinese historians do ...”

“... had been stark and business-like, but Musa’s reworking of the core idea is a florid tale of self-redemption. Crace isn’t offering his readers tips about how to stay alive in a Biblical wilderness, but a parable about the novelist’s relation to reality. It seems that storytelling is one craft about which he feels ambivalent, for Musa, the ...”

“... thoughts; he is a tyrannical but weak master, who looks to God or predestination for excuses. Self-righteously, or with God as his excuse, he flogs Galant and the other slaves for every offence. In a fit of rage he beats Galant’s child to death. The resistance he encounters in Galant is an animal one, like the resistance of horses to their ...”

“... Eliot thought it ‘the only ugliness’ in East Coker. It’s easy to smirk at Eliot – that self-proclaimed ‘classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion’, descended from over two hundred years of Americans and himself a US citizen until his 39th year – being mistaken for the cousin of an English country ...”

“... him to his early sense of what he must give up in order to live, he achieves a brilliant feat of self-understanding. The almost spoken almost gets said in his concluding remarks about love. ‘A perfect love is founded on despair,’ he says, quoting from his sonnets: This paradox is condensed and rhetorical: to get at the truth in it we must expand it a ...”

“... which for so many male American writers is the most crucial one: the search for the unfettered self.’ The ‘unfettered self’, or rather its expression in paint, was exactly what the makers of Abstract Expressionism in the Forties and Fifties pursued. Robert Motherwell was one of ...”

“... by established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage with the question of how a story convinces us of ...”

“... Logorrhoea:​ Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Robert Creeley were all afflicted with it. I only ever witnessed Duncan’s performances – free-form, extended, mostly improvised soliloquies. The one I remember best was at the poet Carl Rakosi’s house. It was many years ago, but I think he touched on Plato, Beethoven, Milton, Tom Thumb, Lysistrata, the genus Asterias (starfish) and the song ‘Penny Lane ...”

“... In 1979 Robert Penn Warren – novelist, critic, and dean of American poets – returned to his native Todd County, Kentucky, to attend ceremonies in honor of another native son – Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, whose United States citizenship had just been restored, ninety years after his death, by a special act of Congress ...”

“... of the visit to the fair and an apt metaphor for the complex distortions of multiple-narrative self-conscious fiction. Prodigious vitality, virtuosity, erudition, self-parody and a grossly anarchic humour were the characteristics of the ‘funhouse’ style, which soon came to be identified with novelists such as ...”

“... dark house in Wimpole Street one September morning; how she met health and happiness, freedom, and Robert Browning in the church round the corner.’ Lady Geraldine’s courtship had been drowned out by talk about Elizabeth’s. Aurora Leigh wasn’t faring any better. The first edition had sold out in a fortnight in 1856 and more than twenty reprints had come ...”