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“... of a Bildungsroman, with her experience offering Felicitas first an approach to God and then to self-discovery: but it’s experience subject to such strange emphases, and so distorted for purely satirical purposes, that Felicitas’s naivety is seen to be not hers so much as a necessary structural device, as in a latterday Candide. Father Cyprian, with his ...”

“... I don’t remember which poems she read; I recall instead the gestures she didn’t make, her self-effacement. In the early 1980s, Larkin was lauded and Amis was famous; Jennings was reading with some student poets at the Old Fire Station arts centre. She was shy, and that brought out the shyness in me, so I didn’t speak to her. But I knew who she ...”

“... face. Breaking this locution out into an upper-case ‘Other’ introduces an opposition between self and Other cherished by literary theorists but alien to the dramatic exigencies of this moment of dialogue. Earlier, speaking of the Transjordanian tribes, Havrelock writes: ‘They pledge obedience to Joshua as long as “Yahweh your God [her italics] is ...”

“... claims of chemotherapists and immunotherapists. The book is highly personal in tone with repeated, self-congratulatory references to Dr Israel’s own work and to that of his colleagues and friends. The language is often imprecise and the arguments ill-ordered, and it is difficult to agree with Susan Sontag’s statement on the front cover that it is ‘by far ...”

“... individual and public interest’ is brought about by ‘competitive markets and pursuit of self-interest by individuals’. Interestingly, a much smaller proportion of Conservative MPs accepted this claim; and among economists, business economists were more sceptical of it than others. Sen, while not denying all the often-praised virtues of the market ...”

“... in his ‘theatrical’ films of the mid-Fifties, addresses this condition of film with great self-irony.) Rushdie also unjustly dismisses the dream source of Dorothy’s Oz: ‘The film, like the TV soap opera Dallas, introduces an element of bad faith when it permits the possibility that everything that follows’ – from Dorothy’s being knocked ...”

“... Baker cites in his exhaustive biography is Wheatley’s own memoirs, and Wheatley was a relentless self-aggrandiser; but it sounds about right. In the mid-1960s, three decades into his career, he had 55 books in print, which collectively accounted for one seventh of Hutchinson’s turnover; Arrow, Hutchinson’s paperback imprint, was selling 1,150,000 ...”

“... hesitate to list them, and sometimes summarise them, for pages on end. Nowhere is 4321 more self-congratulatory than on the subject of race. The white protagonists of this book are morally unimpeachable; Amy, in one timeline, becomes a civil rights activist who dates a black man, and Ferguson is routinely presented with opportunities to demonstrate that ...”

“... interest in the upbringing of his oldest and most unruly daughter – ‘A child more obstinately self-willed I certainly never came across’ – and Mary was exiled from the family in a succession of more or less unhappy boarding-schools. She was briskly despatched to relatives for the holidays, and only reunited with her parents at the age of ...”

“... and bewildered viewpoint). Patrick can get no comfort, either, from his mother, Eleanor, a cold, self-conscious, self-absorbed heiress. By the time we join Patrick in the second novel, Bad News, he is in his mid-twenties, is in New York to collect his father’s ashes, and has become a fizzing pill of rage and grief and ...”

“... in a language that was not their first. Native language matters more than native place. Robert Frost was a Californian who entrenched himself in New England. T.S. Eliot, for all his Russell Square papistry, came from St Louis. These poets grew to be associated with the territories they adopted and which adopted them. The idea that a place or ...”

“... should provide plenty of grist for the biographer’s mill. But here, as in other respects, Robert Graves is an awkward subject, for the salient feature of his career is its lack of obvious stages. Looking backwards from his 70th birthday, he observed contentedly: ‘I always aimed at writing more or less as I still do.’ Having paid his debt to ...”

“... New York’s Guggenheim Museum contains in an annex a covert Robert Mapplethorpe gallery, a sober exhibition space which, like the masterpieces of its namesake, seems consecrated to the unusual and the mortifying. The current show – Joel-Peter Witkin’s photographs of corpses, amputees and hermaphrodites – holds a grotesqueness sufficient to remind the visitor of how sweet, how antique already, the infamous Mapplethorpe images have become ...”

“... and Reznikoff, and of course the whole group of poets associated with Black Mountain College – Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Ed Dorn, Robert Duncan and Charles Olson. Of all these it was Charles Olson who engaged most directly and continuously with the implications of Pound’s poetics. The Maximus Poems can he read ...”

“... both born commoners, crowned themselves Shah and ended up in exile, broken men – like that other self-crowned emperor, Napoleon. It seems now to have been forgotten that Reza Shah too was shunted around in exile, prevented from going where he wished to go. Forced off the throne by the Allies to secure access to Iranian oil during the Second World War, Reza ...”