“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... follow, more or less fabulously narrated; with light digressions, tense asides and much moody self-reflexiveness. The premise of The Double, Saramago’s most recently translated novel, is this: a man, a shy and gloomy history teacher, watches a video and catches sight of someone, an uncredited bit-part actor playing a hotel receptionist, who is identical ...”

“... the other side of arcane and seemingly pointless disputes are struggling with the question of what self-image it would be best for human beings to have. So it is with the dispute about truth that has been going on among the philosophy professors ever since the days of Nietzsche and James. That dispute boils down to the question of whether, in our pursuit of ...”

“... the family with keeping the nobility at a distance; and he endorses a widely held view that a self-interested, obdurately entrenched nobility was the Achilles’ heel of the regime. The secret of Charlemagne’s success, however, was to mobilise family and elite at the same time, thereby securing their more or less harmonious coexistence within the ...”

“... to the glories of diction not the mysteries of charisma, the discipline of repertory not the self-immolation of the single performance. He directed and lectured, recorded albums of Shakespeare, did films, television; but the English stage was Gielgud’s echo-chamber for seventy years, and he is centrally responsible for the English sense of a national ...”

“... great case for rationality, for the necessary and moral correction of error – think of Emma’s self-abasements when she realises how poorly she has read her world – while simultaneously undermining the grounds of that rationality by showing that the quest for transparency is in fact driven by cloudy desire. Is this a contradiction or a paradox? Can ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to dream away his power to change things, and restores reality to something like its old flawed self.‘I have never written a plot-driven novel,’ Le Guin said. ‘I admire plot from a vast distance, with unenvious admiration. I don’t do it; never did it; don’t want to; can’t.’ She tended to write stories which include long journeys that loop back ...”

“... ambivalent sort of independence, and so ended up alienating everyone. Legitimists accused him of self-interest, while the new government doubted his loyalty. He found himself socially ostracised and professionally stuck, working as an ‘obscure assistant judge’ while his contemporaries rose through the magistracy. America provided a way out. Under the ...”

“... of leader it is because he has tapped a deep well of left-wing anti-liberalism. His combative and self-assured tone helps. A characteristic example of his provocative style is his claim, made after Trump won the presidency in 2016, that Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans were being ‘hysterical’ when they saw Trump as a danger to democracy, since ...”