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“... 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 ...”

“... definition of nostalgia. As her novels become more ghostly, so they give off a stronger vapour of self-promotion. Her last, Written On The Body, announced on its cover that it had ‘fused mathematical exactness and poetic intensity and made language new’. Her latest also bears a Winterson-accented description on its jacket: ‘Art & Lies is a rich ...”

“... Pipes. He decries the ‘archetypes’ which these authors find in the Russian psyche: a lack of self-worth, intolerance of the opinions of others, and a mixture of spite, envy and worship of external power. Worst of all is the sadomasochistic Russian admiration of brute force and the desire to be dominated by a strong master. These traits are doubly ...”

“... Now then, gentlemen, let your thought be on that that thought the washbasket!’ He also dwelt on self-annihilation, and in his last years made a cult of death. In this country his reception has been less than tumultuous. Carlyle, liking the idea of self-annihilation, and also finding in him a sympathetic tendency to ...”

“... That principle survives because it evolved a style, a subtle and endlessly productive form of self-revelation. Argufying is a book of wonderful sentences rather than wonderful arguments. The sentences are wonderful because they are so unflustered, so undesigning, so remote from any intention to be wonderful. Their most characteristic gesture is the ...”

“... Author’, in Acrimony). The estrangement is not exactly personal, because the father is so self-absorbed, abstracted and prematurely old. In ‘My Father at Fifty’, from Acrimony again, Gert Hofmann can no longer maintain his ‘marvellous, single-minded regime’. Things are different now ... Wherever you are, there is a barrage of noise: your ...”

“... beginning, ‘The hills are shadows, and they flow ...’ And so in other places. While in the self-borrowings Tennyson is essentially stabilising an often torn and tormented mind by mustering evidences ‘of the continuity of his own creativity’, in the echoing of great poets who have gone before him he is seeking to enjoy ‘in the face of lonely ...”

“... the ‘diabolical’ personality of Blunt). The British are perhaps unusually prone to voluntary self-deception where the morality of people in public life is concerned. A moment of very pure humbug was reached in the Blunt affair when the Observer printed as proof of his depravity a story about Blunt disparaging a man behind his back after being ...”