“... an aesthete fostered some paragraphs which are subjected to a withering critique in his remarkable self-portrait Pack My Bag, written in 1938-9 under the threat of war and now reissued. He began his first novel Blindness while still at school; it came out while he was at Oxford. His account of undergraduate life there in Pack My Bag is a little rushed, but it ...”

“... to know where we are by never being anywhere else. And one fundamental means of orientation, of self-recognition, is the difference between the sexes, despite the fact that in practice they keep leaking into each other. Once you stop pointing to body parts and start talking, the apparent differences between men and women begin to dissipate. So if we ...”

“... the portraits left by Nadar, is in many ways a capital document for understanding the tormented, self-destructive trajectory of his ‘life’. Gaëtan Picon remarked that in the Nadar photograph of 1862 the 41-year-old Baudelaire looked as if he were a hundred (Baudelaire himself, in one of the ‘Spleen’ poems, made it a thousand). The face, above all ...”

“... Conversely, Life goes on, like most fiction nowadays, is not free of the heavy hand of writerly self-consciousness. Virtually every (male) character here is at once an actual rogue and a potential writer. Cullen in his less frenetic moments sits down to write a novel on his father’s behalf which brings home the prestigious Windrush Prize. His friend Bill ...”

“... Hofstadter’s earlier books. In particular, there is much material revolving around the ideas of self-reference and its relationship to consciousness. Here, to give an example of hardcore Hofstadterismus, is a telling passage buried for the assiduous or serendipitous reader to spot in the bibliography: Gebstedter, Egbert B. Thetamagical Memas: Seeking the ...”

“... urgent, impressive. As a result, in no other literature is the writer so much a performing self, as Richard Poirier has observed, and in no other literature is such a premium placed on raw data and its virtuoso delivery. The American interest in ‘fact’ derives from the same complex of attitudes. One can see it not only in the regularly contemptuous ...”

“... to be sure. For the picture is not only contradictory, it is also deceptive: a carefully contrived self-image masquerading as a spontaneous and unself-conscious record. The pensive pose, with the left hand on the cheek, and the gaze wistfully directed towards some distant horizon, was deliberately struck by Elgar while a lunchtime visitor went out to get his ...”

“... creature: part memoir, part criticism, part fiction, part feminist tract or call to arms or self-help manual or biography or work of literary history. Perhaps the best clue to what she’s doing comes when the narrator considers ‘training to be a psychoanalyst, and I will become a feminist analyst to tortured, eccentric artists.’ This would be her ...”

“... but liberally rewarded. His own speeches and the letters attributed to him are so laden with self-promotion and so rhetorically wrought as to leave their author’s real personality and intentions in question. Historians have been sharply divided in their assessments of Demosthenes, some seeing him as a consummate politician who never uttered a sentence ...”

“... nostalgia on the early days of psychoanalysis. ‘When we scrutinise the personalities who, by self-selection, became the first generation of psychoanalysts,’ she said, we are left in no doubt about their characteristics. They were the unconventional ones, the doubters, those who were dissatisfied with the limitations imposed on knowledge; also among ...”

“... held out. We’re a-helping Lyra,’ Hester says. ‘Then she was pressing her little proud broken self against his face, as close as she could get, and then they died.’ Pullman’s range of emotional registers is immense. He can describe and attach value to tidying up your room, as when Lyra runs off with the Gyptians (who travel in long-boats) and has to ...”

“... confirmed that ‘everybody with even a minor respiratory tract infection or a fever should be self-isolating for a period of seven days.’ I was in court that day watching a landlord’s representative demanding immediate possession against a tenant in her mid-forties who was in rent arrears by £2000. The barrister made a number of points, some ...”

“... walked in off the street? It’s very hard to describe this effect. Rudavsky-Brody speaks of ‘self-parody’; Auden says another poem is ‘burlesque’. These are very good intuitions, but we need to keep going. If Valéry was Eliot, we would think of irony; if he was Yeats or Pound, we might reach for the idea of performance. Rilke could be a closer ...”

“... classes has inevitably become wider. The upper classes are, on the one hand, no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism. Today the eminent know that success is just reward for their own capacity, for their own efforts, and for their own undeniable achievement. They deserve to belong to a superior class . . . As for ...”

“... for suggesting any possible alternative to dismissing her book for the monstrous piece of self-serving narcissism that it appears to be. However, there is the likelihood that Diana Melly is not in fact treading a spiritual path (only perhaps leading us up a garden one), and therefore two further motives for her book are conceivable: one is that this ...”