“... be faulted for glossing over the scrounging, the fiddling, the fecklessness, the delinquency, the self-deception and the wilful irrationality which are as authentic a part of the picture as the unmerited hardships, the gratuitous humiliations and the irremediable, self-perpetuating lack of opportunities for ...”

“... any rate. Yet his conclusion is caustic: In the poetic tradition now dominant the authoritative self, discoursing in a world of banal, empirically derived objects and relations, depends on its employment of metaphor and simile for poetic vitality ... Poets are now praised above all else as inventors of figures – as rhetoricians, in fact – with a ...”

“... does seem to relate to the way Bainbridge’s characters often encounter death when they’re most self-absorbed, most taken up with the temporary distractions of life. Chance tears through this false reality, revealing a world of instability and mortality. In some ways, it isn’t surprising that these themes are more prominent in Master Georgie than they ...”

“... music of an early morning band achieved nothing which could not have been induced by exercising self-discipline at home, taking plenty of baths and drinking water from the tap, with perhaps the odd pinch of salts from the apothecary. But the water-doctors who battened on the spa trade spread the notion that self-treatment ...”

“... occupied by them for a century and a half; it survived thereafter only by being incorporated as a self-governing unit into the Habsburg Empire, benefiting from Habsburg military protection but successfully resisting administrative rationalisation. As anomalous exemplars of what might be called ‘state-unbuilding’, Poland and Hungary have been conveniently ...”

“... eloquence, for all that, is Prufrock-like, and his stories are finally static and inhibited by self-consciousness. These are funny, despairing vignettes which describe our universe without ever actually daring to disturb it. Dora, one of Kate Pullinger’s protagonists in Tiny Lies, is in the habit of embarking on fact-finding missions. Instead of ...”

“... revelation and concealment. There is a wanting-to-be-known that can desolate or undermine our self-sufficiency.And now, it seems, there are things about Philip Larkin that we’ll never know. So what? Well, put it like this, the loss can be made to sound not at all what Larkin, as we know him from the poems, would have wholly wished. But then again, who ...”

“... and guilty desire? I don’t think he has yet quite explained this to us) a complete, unflawed ‘self-presence’, in which there is no place for the morbid and intrusive Other. ‘Self-presence’ is not a very happy nor a readily understandable term, though it is one which both Gasché and Norris frequently find ...”

“... is exacerbated by Selbourne’s ostentatious contempt for his intellectual betters and a degree of self-regard that the author of a much better book than this would have no title to. ‘Given the scale of the moral and social crises which beset us,’ says Selbourne, can we turn (in a brute world) for guidance, ethical or practical, to an Isaiah Berlin, a ...”

“... noses (we can decipher his will to manipulation without such help), but to lend him the gift of self-commentary. At one point he tries on a striped waistcoat worn in a film of The Fall of the House of Usher. ‘ “I like,” he said obscurely, “I like – you know – to slip in and out of me ... Me and not-me.” ’ But this is not quite ...”

“... Lay aside for a moment your self-esteem and imagine that you are Jeffrey Archer. You are now a model citizen of the Post-Modern state of hyper-reality, a figure in whom actuality and invention, public fact and private fantasy, the business of government and the spinning of yarns have become utterly indistinguishable ...”

“... reciprocity, whose absence haunts each one of us at some level, even prompting fantasies of the self as a surviving twin. The possibility, however fragile, of such an intense and benign duplicity remains a fundamental component of the modern imagination: ‘for some, its very definition’, according to Schwartz. In this charged atmosphere, even World War ...”

“... and again about lower-middle-class gentility (rural Canadian rather than urban English), and its self-obsessed obedience. Like his stories, Munro’s are fat with community: her characters steal their lean solitude from the thickness that surrounds them. These thieves struggle against the pieties and self-satisfactions of ...”

“... that has attacked his face ‘seems to have been of a mongrel, indefinite kind’) and self-centred, he thoughtlessly brings his wife to an early grave. Blind vanity causes the suffering which becomes moral redemption, as he is ‘consecrated anew by his great sorrow’. His theology had been ineffectual, but his grief unites the parish. Amos’s ...”

“... which the widening horizons of literature make possible, a desire for desire. Because of its self-reflexiveness, however, the true subject and feeling of his work is sometimes obscured. Most of the early writing about Mahon emphasised how glamorously well-travelled the poems were. Night-Crossing and Lives, his first collections, with their versions and ...”