“... seemingly describes sex with a man, is followed by ‘The Man’, which seemingly describes a self-satisfied dog; ‘Pussy’ ends on the word ‘poonac’ (a Sri Lankan coconut cake used as animal fodder); in ‘Cloud’, a victim of gang rape is relieved that her attackers weren’t ‘of the opinion that her tits sucked’. In ‘Scratching the ...”

“... or unmistakably that of a certain academic environment. It has wit, which is sometimes spoiled by self-consciousness; it is convoluted, sometimes to the point of collapsing under the weight of its own ornaments – on nearly every page there are both brilliant throw-away insights and needlessly elaborated trivialities. The arguments are indirect and mostly ...”

“... main subject despite his disclaimer, is an apt martyrdom for the writer, principally because it is self-induced: its sufferers have the luxury of blaming only themselves. It also acts as a literary rite de passage, the rash or chancre symbolising the transition from a deluded innocence to an anxious and often painful maturity. Like the shaman who undergoes a ...”

“... chalk became his materials. Without anyone to paint he turned to himself. ‘I did draw one or two self-portraits before,’ he later said, ‘but I’ve always felt there was something a bit banal about doing self-portraits. I didn’t find actual formal components of my head all that interesting when I was ...”

“... as a man dedicated to the external duties of war and exploration, who kept introspection and self-analysis to a minimum. His blandness makes him an amenably malleable subject for a novelist, and Sten Nadolny has taken full advantage of this licence. Most important, he has endowed his John Franklin with a defining character trait for which there is no ...”

“... we get is the person objectified rather than an expressed personality. The look in the eye, the self-presenting stance – the kind of thing Sargent looked for – is missing. Even Nicholson’s large group portrait of the Canadian Headquarters Staff – painted during or just after the war – reads as a scene happened upon. Three of the six figures are in ...”

“... Dreyman himself has when he finds out. So has Wiesler conformed at last, returned to his old Stasi-self, saved his skin? He has asked all the questions his old self would have asked, and got the answers that self would have needed, but his subsequent behaviour is different, and provides ...”

“... set of metaphors for Thomas’s poetic procedures: he ‘plunged into the sump of his teenage self, filling his notebooks with druggy, bewildering lines that would be a kind of fossil fuel to him for years to come . . . Thomas had to be toiling in the element of language like a person in a mudbath.’ In a sense, Thomas’s was the wrong kind of ...”

“... A telling reproach, whatever one’s view of souls. A fine teacher! He knew the proper medicine. Self-righteousness would never be the same, It ceased to be a right. He could never keep his pipe alight, Smouldering matches rained about him. Once he gave it up, to discipline the spirit. His aunties told us over tea and cake:     ‘Because he burnt a hole ...”

“... Liverpudlian’ plays self-mockingly on the idea of ‘pool’. I was born in Liverpool. I would be flattering myself if I claimed that you need to be a comedian to survive there. But Liverpudlians do, like punsters, switch things about: they breathe through their mouths and talk through their noses. They are physiological, existential twisters ...”

“... soil, dig, drill, and lay it down; That’s why the villain loves the villanelle. The enamoured self is soft and needs a shell Though mentors and tormentors seem to frown; Because it’s hard, you want to do it well. Sportsmen and travellers are inclined to tell The scores and challenges that didn’t get them down; Not why the villain loves the ...”

“... an irritable “What? What?” in reply.’ Lodge has set himself a difficult task with this self-portrait of an ordinary man who’s past his prime. In his earlier novels, he personified types or ideas and let the different subjectivities fight it out, with a bit of cheerful tweaking from him. Here, by contrast, he confines himself to one, unrelativised ...”

“... What Plath is really doing, she explains, is writing a poem in which phrases that look like self-descriptions (‘I/smile, cross-legged,/Enigmatical’) generate patterns of sound and form that ‘feed into’ new images. Plath notices she is constructing her poem in this way and inserts phrases like ‘shifting my clarities’ that let the reader know ...”

“... of a wounded animal, twice-divorced and in permanent need of distraction. Manipulative and wildly self-absorbed, she is capable of inflicting Livia Soprano levels of damage on her offspring. Helen hasn’t exactly got the life she wanted but, as her daughter Bridget tells us, she clings to the sustaining delusion that things might change:As with her hating ...”

“... to say and said it.’ How you value that process depends on how you value that form of deliberate self-expression – so popular in the 20th century – which contains a large element of the mere expression of opinion. Speaking of Aldington, among others, Wyndham Lewis fairly says: ‘it is not quite certain that we were not just as big fools as our not very ...”