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“... Suddenly I thought: ‘My God, he’s going to speak to me!’ ‘Am I right in thinking you’re Robert Melville?’ he said. ‘My name is Clark.’ ‘Indisputably, Sir Kenneth,’ I answered. I remember the word I used, because as soon as I said it I realised that it was ludicrously inappropriate. And I went on quickly: ‘It’s a fine Pasmore, isn’t ...”

“... its natural phenomena ‘were becoming his deepest source of solace’. Eddie is aware of ‘the self which, he felt sure, was in process of being born, and which was the reason he had chosen a manner of life on the whole distasteful to him’. An affair with Marcia, the owner’s wife, is followed by an episode with the station manager involving mutual ...”

“... As a boy, Robert Duncan had a recurring dream. He would imagine himself in the middle of a treeless field. The ripe grass rippled, though there was no wind, and the light, as he later remembered, ‘was everywhere’, though there was no sun to be seen. Seeing himself in the centre of a circle of children, all of them singing and playing ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’, Duncan understood that he was ‘it’: ‘the Chosen One … a “King” or victim of the children’s round dance ...”

“... classics’. Both the impressive range of Wharton’s later reading and her lifelong habits of self-education evidently had their origins here. Characteristically, the arrangement of domestic architecture doubles in her telling as an architecture of the self: ‘there was in me a secret retreat where I wished no one to ...”

“... or two.I’m ordinarily annoyed by this mode in fiction, but Le Tellier provides us with a wry, self-referential authorial omniscience that justifies it, deftly switching the narrative from person to person, location to location. He also gives us Victor, the authorial stand-in, whose bestselling book is (of course) called The anomaly (lowercase ‘a’) and ...”

“... strength – making him a sort of liberal alternative to Ayn Rand. It’s a deft and enviable self-placement, but doesn’t make it any easier to characterise him as a writer. Eggers’s bestselling first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000), a memoir about his parents’ deaths and his guardianship of his younger brother, exemplified ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... previous books, which are populated by flat, chronically miserable characters who repeat the same self-defeating and often viscerally revolting actions over and over again, and feature endings that seem determined to mock and disappoint.‘A writer needs some direction,’ Vesta tells herself in an extended dialogue with the mystery-writing advice page,some ...”

“... eventually, a Nazi obsession. In the Fifties, it returns as something brighter. The voice of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies grew out of a negotiation between European and American traditions, not least English and American traditions, with the balance of power tilting decisively towards America. Lowell, coming from an East Coast Wasp society, is ...”

“... detailed and sometimes not-so-detailed arguments have been sharply questioned by the historian Robert Anderson. Davie’s emphasis on the importance of Scottish philosophical writings (among which he includes MacDiarmid’s verse) is designed to be controversial. It should be set beside the recent work of Alexander Broadie, to whose explorations of The ...”

“... studies and critical legal sociology. These movements scrutinise what may be called the cultural self-constitution of law. They attempt to trace exactly how the law goes about establishing its own splendid eminence. In so doing, they adopt an external perspective on the law, keenly aware of the outward mechanics of its operation, but seemingly indifferent to ...”

“... inspiring schoolteacher, but his shyness stayed for a good deal of his adult life, and he remained self-effacing, with a tendency to smile at himself and the Gaelic culture which was crucial to him. Crichton Smith had a liking for Chinese restaurants, and wrote a number of poems (which he enjoyed delivering at readings) on Chinese themes. In one a couple ...”

“... from North Carolina, but it was a poor fit for the European sophisticate he’d become, however self-mockingly he inhabited the role. His writing has remained competent and straightforward, but memorable prose was never part of Sedaris’s appeal. He writes like a performer: one senses, reading his essays, that they were destined first and foremost for a ...”

“... new body can be if one is to remain the same person. I may feel I’m most essentially a mental self, that my identity is in some deep way independent of my body, but ‘I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is present in a ship,’ as Descartes observed. ‘I am very closely joined and, as it were, intermingled with it, so that I and the body form ...”

“... the kid is hanged and his semen spatters the bar. The bartender wipes it off with his bar rag.’ Self-parody, of course, counts among those games-playing activities of modern fiction which stress its self-sufficiency and its incapacity for saying anything about life. No good Burroughs ‘extending his vision ...”