“... as though obligatorily with what was by now Byron’s literary signature, his morose and tormented self-projection as the poem’s ‘hero’. But the context is contemporary Europe, pacified and carved up by the victorious Allies after the collapse of the Napoleonic empire. Against the backdrop of this new conservative dispensation, the motifs of Childe ...”

“... interest in thinkers, mostly of the Stoic tradition, who have promoted the rival virtues of self-sufficiency, she writes to call attention to those who preach and practise sympathy. These philosophers and novelists expand the limits of association a society takes for granted, and by doing so extend the possibilities of reform, and their commentator ...”

“... and Common Sense’ and ‘On Depth and Superficiality’’ and the demolition of the theory of self-interest and identity in the Principles of Human Action. But that is the best-kept secret about Hazlitt: he is a hard thinker, with an intricacy not imposed by the usual stratagems – officious jargon, protective suavity, the counterfeit of impeccable logic ...”

“... are virtual transcriptions (with a Nietzschean accent) of words of Emerson’s. In Emerson’s ‘Self-Reliance’ there is a pair of sentences I have previously had occasion variously to cite and interpret: ‘The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion.’ I will merely assert here that Emerson ...”

“... autobiography, for instance, he chose not to recount his life directly but to project a diffused self-portrait onto four well-known cultural figures who had been his friends (Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Eric Gill and John Middleton Murry), evoking them first separately and then in some slightly dizzying comparisons: I had seen Murry working, happily ...”

“... as about the ways in which an older person casts off and then re-creates and rewrites his younger self. This allows him a potentially ironised perspective on his earlier experiences while wistfully permitting the earlier intensities to glimmer through. So while Beaupuy and the young radical Wordsworth are passionately invoking a series of abstract nouns to ...”

“... have cribbed from: ‘The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out; what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction.’ ‘“Identity” became a synonym for “safe space” in which alikeness rather than difference could be explored.’ Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about Billie Holiday, ‘Songs for a Coloured Singer’, is called out ...”

“... in character that she should have found her settled artistic identity through an act of symbolic self-effacement, delegating the creative task to a proxy, a woman of much the same age, who, as it were, writes the story for her. Both The Wall, her most emotionally powerful book, and The Loft, her most intellectually sophisticated, make use of the same ...”

“... enough to ensure that he never found the judgment of the scientific community transparent or self-evident. The idyll did not last. Some aspects of Polanyi’s vision of Berlin were naive and others were fragile. By 1930, some observers saw quite clearly what was wrong and what might soon happen. The delusion was that science was then the totally free and ...”

“... present mood, your desire for and attempts at suicide, show more than anything else your loss of self-control … it’s not a question of you carrying out some wish or command of mine, but just in your stability, in a quiet, sensible relationship to life. And as long as you don’t have that, life with you is senseless for me. In the months before her ...”

“... of other people’s pieties (sometimes even his own)! How wickedly good at puncturing the self-regard of the intelligentsia! What a master of black humour!! What a polemical style!! In the great tradition of the arch-polemicists Marx and Lenin, but used for their undoing!!! Solzhenitsyn was born in December 1918, a few months after his father died in ...”

“... our interest and the writer’s feelings. Gray’s later experiments with bardic odes and self-conscious ‘fragments’ may have qualified him to be considered a proto-Romantic in some sketches of poetical history, but Wordsworth was right to think of him at ‘the head’ of an alien poetical culture. Gray loved poetic diction, as well as scholarly ...”

“... de la Correspondance, a private weekly showcase run by Mammès-Claude Pahin de la Blancherie, a self-aggrandising businessman who had a ‘tense’ relationship with the official arts administration. Showing under Pahin’s aegis guaranteed exposure but meant running the risk of having your paintings seized by his hungry creditors. The rise of the Royal ...”

“... so was he piqued by Heaney’s habit of characterising what he admired in others in self-descriptive terms? Or did ‘dividend from ourselves’ and ‘high yields’ trigger resentment at Heaney’s financial security, now that his Nobel Prize ‘doubloons’, as he called them, had been invested? Mahon’s jibe looks worse because the Letters ...”

“... Howard Marks has become his own ghost. Hallucination recollected in tranquillity. The older self, unaffected by years of fiddling with Rizla papers, warming resinous lumps, feeding on curls of aromatic smoke, looks back; invigilates the past. Visible breath clouding the window. Indulgently, the biographer taps the keys, takes down the story. A life ...”