“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it never quite works. Actors helplessly act – whereas the Sonnets have a certain autonomy and self-containment that is also expressive and outgoing. These are poems at once so inward as to be enigmas for editors, yet so entirely realised as to be available to any reader who wants to experience them. Since they are so various, covering many moods and many ...”

“... publication of the series and people’s reactions to it, and so it takes place on a higher, more self-conscious level, so to speak. It also recapitulates some of the material in the earlier books, particularly the father’s death in Book 1. Actually, if you want to begin here with Six, maybe you ought to read Book 1 first.Q. Is this fiction or ...”

“... she was ‘Jeanette Winterson’, the outsider who gatecrashed the canon, or alternatively the self-sabotaging golden girl and egomaniac who could never match that first success. When I met Jeanette she was working as the women’s editor at Brilliance Books, a gay publishing house that received funding from the GLC and was based on Clerkenwell Green, near ...”

“... O’Neill lamented his lack of a great language adequate to his tragic subject: ‘By way of self-consolation, I don’t think, from the evidence of all that is being written today, that great language is possible for anyone living in the discordant, broken, faithless rhythm of our time.’ ‘Our time’ is perhaps not just the 20th century, but the ...”

“... glossed over. No doubt Barney herself did much to prompt the prevailing euphoria. She was a born self-publicist and mythomane: a seductress of astonishing (and candid) appetites, the self-appointed doyenne of ‘Greek’ loves, a blowsy, billowy, impossibly garrulous cheerleader for la vie sapphique. (‘I want to be the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... hands of Burbage/Hamlet/Brutus. Hamlet’s desperate efforts to shore up the difference between self and show, acting and performance, produce in him an existential vertigo – a nausea that would be unrecognisable to the hero of The Revenger’s Tragedy. Though Vindice is momentarily troubled by a ‘doubt/Whether I’m myself or no’, his ...”

“... but in a friendly spirit, Hirschman appears to have been spoilt by success. There is an element of self-indulgence, sometimes of self-congratulation, that prevents him from achieving the same rigour and clarity that characterised his earlier work. The self-indulgence shows itself in a ...”

“... the end of British rule. He was also afflicted by overweening arrogance, dogmatic certainty and a self-destructive fondness for Johnnie Walker Black. In spite of his extraordinary talent, which led him from the back-country of Luoland in western Kenya to the graduate economics programme at Harvard, he ended his life at 46 as a mid-level bureaucrat in ...”

“... wants to find safety,’ as Canetti has put it. Thomas Mann was notorious for his self-importance and his suspicion of anyone whom he felt might be detecting signs of weakness in him; Thomas Hardy spent his last days writing venomously bad verses against fellow authors whom he felt had patronised him. Across the Atlantic the Hemingways and ...”

“... He liked using a histrionic ‘we’ to align himself with some group that was being hounded by self-appointed guardians of philosophical propriety: ‘we pragmatists’, ‘we anti-representationists’ or ‘we historicists’, for example, or, most inclusively, ‘we ironists’ – cheerful, tolerant, optimistic democrats who, having let go of ...”

“... claims, Styron’s novel stages ‘a massive – and daringly modernist – project of racial self-transcendence’. How ‘daringly modernist’ is this project, given that, in 1773, John Bicknell and Thomas Day published a first-person poem called The Dying Negro, based on a newspaper account about a slave who shot himself rather than be sent to the ...”