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“... fact, a very substantial subject. Birthstone is doing, miles away, a similar job – that of the self-contained novel creating its own reality. It starts, banally enough, on a coach tour of Cornwall, but soon reveals, in the mind of the narrator, a modern vein of fantasy. Cornwall provides some of the details – to do with the tourist attraction of crawling ...”

“... Robert Burchfield, Editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, made a bid to unite two nations divided by a common language by unveiling the Oxford American Dictionary, which includes such words as gridlock (“urban traffic jam”). ’ So proclaimed the Sunday Telegraph Magazine. British and American English do indeed differ in all sorts of ways, as the following list of equivalent pairs will remind any doubters: lift/elevator, push-chair/stroller, bonnet/hood, boot/trunk, windscreen/windshield ...”

“... how the rest of MacLean’s poetry is born out of war, out of the clash of warring elements of the self, and out of divided loyalties, as well as out of the heroic fight for the survival of his people’s language and culture. It is no accident that the last poem in this book, the recent ‘Screapadal’, is a meditation both on the clearance of Raasay in 1846 ...”

“... who finds himself in the thick of the latest Flaxborough murder. It’s a piece of miscalculated self-consciousness on Colin Watson’s part – almost the only miscalculation in the book. The Flaxborough Chronicles embody a great many of the virtues that make the golden-age detective story still one of the most widely read literary forms. They have their ...”

“... a cheerful fellow absorbed in his marriage pro spects, experiences such a fugue from his usual self when he shaves his head and becomes a wandering sanyasi. If The Guide is Narayan’s most accomplished novel, this is because it organises best the disparate states and transformations of its central figure. Raju himself pictures for us a number of different ...”

“... thrown over his shoulders. That one has got his hand on his belly. Where are their shoes?’) and self-conscious overwriting (‘Gob was dashed with horror, as if someone had filled a bucket with pure liquid horror and dumped it over his head’). The world of the novel is wildly inventive, with the emphasis on wild; it is the product of a brilliant ...”

“... Horned Man (2002) gave us an absent-minded professor whose confidence in the unknowability of the self masked deep corruption; Seven Lies (2006) offered a damaged liar mixed up in international intrigue. The book of Lasdun’s that I recalled most intensely while reading The Fall Guy was his 2013 memoir Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. It ...”

“... its earliest past. The deadening effect of the jargon in which the heretical doctrine of ‘self-management’ is often formulated by aging exponents of a former orthodoxy is not wholly eradicated by the considerable success of the policy in practice. Yugoslavia’s finest writer, the former Party hard-liner Milovan Djilas, though free to attend and ...”

“... intention when he was practising Abstract Expressionism: he said he had in mind the late self-portraits of Rembrandt and hoped that a face might one day emerge from the brushstrokes. The day never came. Perhaps when handling the brush he should have held a photograph in his other hand. I’m sure Bacon wouldn’t like the word, but I don’t think it ...”

“... narrowed eyes? The fear that you’ll realise the truth about us? That we are, deep down, self-disgusted losers? Or maybe we’re afraid you won’t notice. It doesn’t matter how many books we’ve sold, or whether we’ve been on Letterman or Oprah. We’re nerds. Dorks. Putzes. Schlumps. And we don’t want to let you forget it. In his first two ...”

“... of America. She was shocked by the ‘overabundance of everything’ and the ‘complete self-confidence of individuals’. She told her brother and sister that most of New England is ‘wasted’. ‘It makes nonsense,’ she added, ‘of all the world-planning talk about cultivating the desert and the jungle – all they have to do is to cultivate ...”

“... smile and considerable charm . . . He struck me as the Danakil equivalent of a nice, rather self-conscious Etonian who had just won his school colours for cricket.’ In the Sudan in 1936 he still wore a white sweater with the Old Etonian colours. Later yet, he voted Liberal because Jo Grimond was an Old Etonian. The school gave him a taste for ...”

“... era ruled. In this desert of greed, vanity and corruption one could always rely on the tonic of Robert Hughes pieces in Time and the New York Review of Books, now collected. He lays about him splendidly, not sparing any link in the chain that tethers artists to their time, from the studio to the dealers and their pimps, and to the final rings in the ...”

“... The Romantic era produced in abundance both self-dramatisers and self-esteemers. Despite their obvious relation, they are, and remain, two distinct species. In our own literature Byron is the prototype of the first, Wordsworth of the second. The great Goethe was, in his time, king and emperor of both, and highly revered for it ...”

“... of stylistic precedence and traditional modes of expression are common to both. In the case of Robert Hughes, author of the monumental American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, the artist of choice would be John Singer Sargent, brilliant pictorial chronicler of the beau monde of the 19th century. Like Sargent, Hughes is a brilliant ...”