“... of Hollis Brown’, ‘Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream’ or ‘Tangled Up in Blue’. It is also self-evidently and self-consciously fictive. Many of the recollections are too detailed to be plausible as unadorned memories (whatever they are). Before explaining that he’d travelled to New York from the Midwest in the back ...”

“... its thrust – would have been that, just as you can’t judge a book by its cover, which is a self-evident fact, so you shouldn’t base your opinion of anything else on surfaces or first impressions: you can’t judge an accused man by his physiognomy. Fine. But as the number of books jostling for readers’ attention has grown, publishers have toiled to ...”

“... Highdown Hill and sits in the open air. In The Child that Books Built (2002), Francis Spufford’s self-portrait of the author as reader, he tracks his journey from picture books to teenage comics and his first encounters with pornography. His childhood was lonely because there was sickness in the house: his baby sister had cystinosis, a rare genetic ...”

“... didact; but as rhetoric it remains unconvincing, largely because of its ingenuousness and lack of self-reflexivity. Much water has passed under the bridge since then. Aslam, in this unusually poised and illuminating novel, is rarely ingenuous. He decisively escapes the romanticism – despite, at first glance, seeming to edge close to it in his early pages ...”

“... should be a committed participant in the works he observes, and the works themselves aren’t self-created or autonomous but precipitated in the crucible of society and history. ‘My position is that texts are worldly,’ he writes in The World, the Text and the Critic. ‘To some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are ...”

“... further intensive but brief periods of therapy. After Lowenfeld’s death in 1985, she continued a self-analysis through her art, her written reflections and what she called her ‘pensées plume’, or ‘feather-thoughts’. ‘The cost of Parents fixation (one of the cost[s]) is your total inability to deal with siblings,’ she wrote in her diary in ...”

“... between us was important to us, but it is not important to the pictures. What is in them is self-contained and, in some strange way, free of us both. That day, however, when I asked him about the final images, he related an elegant and nicely self-contained anecdote. He had been away, he said, working in Switzerland ...”

“... been no question of using first-person narration. That technique, he insisted, would have been too self-indulgent: his treatment of Strether had ‘to keep in view proprieties much stiffer and more salutary’ that ‘forbid the terrible fluidity of self-revelation’. Not all writers would share James’s need for the ...”

“... shoulder straps’? As a modern young woman with a modicum of education and a decent allowance, self-fulfilment, not self-sacrifice, becomes her mantra. ‘Pretty mediocre’ at architecture, Pratt transfers to a course in journalism, vowing to become a writer. She joins the Tomorrow Club, precursor of International ...”

“... frozen routines and discourses needing ludic disassembly. These plays run the gamut of the self-conscious genres, from Paid on Both Sides (subtitled ‘A Charade’) and Enemies of a Bishop (‘A Morality in Four Acts’) through to the most portentously earnest and last of the plays, On the Frontier (1938), which as if in an act of final disowning is ...”

“... who had no claim to it. Of course he doesn’t himself make this point; he must have thought it self-evident. To talk thus may be thought fuddy-duddy, but the question is not about manners, which have changed in matters of this kind, but about truth, or at any rate about accuracy. ‘Morgan’ gives a false impression of the relationship between the ...”

“... stub of a piton hammered in by the first person to tread this way thirty years before), and with self-images. On a climb that frightens me my self feels to myself like an overheated cave; doubts of my adequacy flicker and dart like a maddened bat; not until this uncontrollable soot-black monster deigns to retreat into the ...”

“... may be less contentiously characterised as the belief that the capabilities and the demands of the self are disproportionate to its circumstances,’ The reason this agreeable solution to the problem of solidarity is so hard to attain and maintain is precisely the friction between our public and private lives. ‘To obtain the means for our material support we ...”

“... a particularly serious publisher of poetry. Appearing there did nothing to contradict Bishop’s self-stylisation as a ‘poet by default’: ‘I’ve always felt that I’ve written poetry more by not writing it than writing it.’ In a generation at worst of noise-makers and grimly professional professionals – ‘Les Maudits: the compliment/ each ...”

“... persistence, or endurance of spirit, and to a passion for descriptive specificity when it comes to self-adornment: what some call style. Cunningham, who died in 2016 at 87, was celebrated for the weekly photo essays he published for decades in the New York Times: ‘On the Street’ was an exquisite exercise in public pattern recognition, and ‘Evening ...”