“... about La Montez. Past biographers, according to Bruce Seymour, were hoodwinked by one of the great self-inventors in an age of invention – and it would be foolish to have expected anything less of this amazing woman, the Madonna of her day, a star in the firmament of ball-breakers. The clever, spoilt and wilful child of an illegitimate Irish beauty and a ...”

“... when she married Hardy in 1874, she was a mature woman with decided opinions and a strong sense of self-esteem committing herself to a shy but ambitious novelist. Oddly, not one of the letters she wrote before her marriage, or for many years after it, has survived. She would have been far from pleased with Michael Millgate’s speculations on their ...”

“... and fashion and sexual display rather than settling down to their natural and God-ordained role as self-effacing mothers and household drudges. Most women used corsets to narrow their waists only (only?) a few inches, Steele claims, but even tight-lacing – subject of many medical warnings, sermons and humorous prints, not to mention the scene in Gone with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an engineer from West Cork, said they were, meaning a breed of new Irish, forward-looking and self-reliant, with both an upright fidelity to their Irish birthright and a taste for Schubert on the gramophone and a ‘cognac-een’. Their bi-racial origins and bilingual practices uniquely qualified his family to live in the utopian Ireland which Jack ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... foreseeable effect on the future. And musings of that sort may help to establish a personality, a self of sorts, that provides connections between past, present and future. Driven to it, we might even claim to discern a structural relationship between events in childhood, youth, middle age and old age, chronologically remote elements that pertain to one ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... her father’s nastiness and his drinking; her mother’s death; her eating and purging and self-pity. Sometimes the repetition is suffocating, sometimes it just feels repetitious, and the depressive’s dark poetry begins to pall as yet another beautiful way to die is imagined: ‘I warmed my thawing fingers, poured myself more whisky, pictured the ...”

“... provoke ‘many just occasions of Duel’. Laughing at others, he warned, was a sign of prideful self-love. But as a political theorist who conceived of social life as a competition, Hobbes valued laughter for the same reason: it was a terrific index of disdain. All the ‘pleasure and jollity of the mind’ consisted in feeling superior to others, he wrote ...”

“... smiling. It’s a tragi-comic romantic image: is he dressed up for a particular person, or is this self-fashioning a case of art for art’s sake? In another black and white photograph, two women ride a scooter in printed dresses, one wearing sunglasses and one without; elsewhere, a man with black bell-bottoms, a black turtleneck and blazer carries a guitar ...”

“... 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 ...”