“... narratives: either the survival of the human spirit in the face of inhuman brutality; or the self-sacrificial contribution to the Soviet national achievement. Figes’s own narrative is constructed around the idea of the family as a site of ‘human feelings and emotions’, a ‘moral sphere’ that was opposed to the ‘moral vacuum of the Stalinist ...”

“... the great man said, all happy families are not alike,’ he tells us (as a narrator he is prone to self-justification and literary allusion): happiness for the Quinns means Felix manoeuvring his wife, Marisa, into the vicinity of a hunky man and then fading expectantly into the background. He turns up late to their dance lessons, hoping to find her tangoing ...”

“... do justice to those excluded (often deliberately) by those codes? And how can the applause of the self-styled owners of those conventions and traditions be other than condescending and self-congratulatory? ‘Coolie Odyssey’ begins: Now that peasantry is in vogue Poetry bubbles from peat bogs, People strain for the old ...”

“... an inveterate liar is to do him less than justice. He was in fact a compulsive fantasist and self-inventor. The only child of Ashkenazi Jews from the Pale of Settlement, he clung to his fantasies with such tenacity that they became the source of a precarious yet highly successful career as a writer and an authority on all matters ‘Oriental’ – a ...”

“... She provides a thumbnail sketch of his life, in the spirit of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning, more text than fact, but is convinced that he failed to achieve the goal of his self-construction, ‘a place in the power structure’. She is fine on his medical ...”

“... boxes, packed away with the books, leaflets, articles, pamphlets, flyers, punk CDs and ‘Will Self Is Stupid’ badges Home gave me to help with my researches. So many different authors, formats, purports; except that all of it was really done by him. Stewart Home was born in South London in 1962, and, until recently, has lived and worked in Bethnal ...”

“... greatest single influence – Thoreau’s Walden – Auster writes crisply and sensuously about self-reliance, austerity and solitude. His novels are, almost without exception, inventive, elegant and deeply entertaining. Oracle Night follows the paradigm for most of Auster’s fiction, which goes something like this. There is a man. He is alone in a ...”

“... boy.’ In a more intricate move he decides he might want to use ‘exist’ as a transitive verb. Self-creation could be worded as ‘I exist me,’ and Pessoa claims that the phrase will have ‘expressed a whole philosophy in three small words’. Needless to say, he doesn’t write like this, and he is never obscure or confused. But he is very lucid about ...”

“... to the ground, while dandies, belletrists and idealist philosophers are the social equivalent of self-indulgence in art. It is no wonder that he returns time and again to Don Quixote, with its clash between the fantasies of the master and the pragmatism of the man. The dreamers have turned language into an autonomous realm, Marx protests in The German ...”

“... listless these men may briefly become, like Coyote they bounce back, spurred by ambition and blind self-belief. When Donovan contacts James, now a lowly solicitor, and asks him to process his divorce, James imagines that his early dreams of a brilliant career will finally be realised, when what lies ahead is in fact more humiliation. At the end of The ...”

“... the family unit. In the 19th century, Charles Fourier drew up blueprints for ‘phalansteries’, self-contained communities of around a thousand people who would undertake all the necessary tasks (children would be looked after in the ‘noisy area’, next to the carpenters and blacksmiths). Jane Sophia Appleton designed kitchenless cities where everyone ...”

“... her three earlier novels translated into English, the protagonists are often thwarted by a lack of self-understanding. In Love (1997), which unfolds over a single night in northern Norway, Jon thinks endlessly of the celebration he imagines his mother, Vibeke, is planning for his ninth birthday. Vibeke, meanwhile, focuses on anything but Jon, among them a ...”

“... to models outside Japan, including Baudelaire, Wilde and most of all, Poe. There is a good deal of self-conscious decadence in early Tanizaki, often involving dominant and cruel women to whom feeble men are in thrall. Then, after the great Kanto earthquake of 1923, Tanizaki moved away from the ruined city of Tokyo and went to live in the Kansai (the ...”

“... morphine addict) and he is broken emotionally and professionally too. He retreats into a shell of self-absorption and despair. To top it all, Fanny Ratcliff has died of a mysterious, debilitating illness. The outbreak of war finds Edward Haggard working miserably as a GP in Griffin Head, a fictional South Coast town. Then one day there walks into his surgery ...”

“... of one another, women must choose, and their struggles to do so may serve as a catalyst for self-definition, resistance and writing.’ Queen Anne is the most prominent example of a woman whose mixed loyalties resulted in ‘self-definition’. Her husband was reluctant to acknowledge her autonomous royal status as ...”