“... inspiring human cause in European history, became merely a subordinate scene in the drama of his self-justification. This manipulation of the past is illuminated by the recovery of a poem dating from the mid-1790s, hitherto thought to exist only in a fragmentary state. Exactly two hundred years ago, in the summer of 1795, Wordsworth visited his university ...”

“... on it by its colonists, all the repression they continued to exert until quite recently, all that self-consciousness about being the refuge of ‘second-rate Europeans’, Australia can at last be interested primarily in its own othernesses, in what occurs in a culture that is as remote from the protocols of the mother country (not that the expression can now ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... won a literary prize. (I’m not bitter.) (Am.) (Am not.) (Am.) (Am not.) (Am.)’ Neurotic and self-obsessed, Victoria makes cynical use of her relationships: ‘I make my living recasting the splurge of my friends’ emotional lives into the symmetry of fiction.’ So there are misgivings in her circle when she sends out an unusual invitation. Victoria ...”

“... or Vicesimus Knox’s many editions of Elegant Extracts, which claim that the selections are so self-evidently worthy as to be above controversy and the caprices of individual taste. At the same time, Price refuses to be limited by content-driven polemics, taking the anthology seriously as a genre that serves distinct publics. Equally attentive to the ...”

“... crisis is something that is arguably misdescribed as statutory underpinning of a voluntary system. Self-regulation cannot work without some measure of statutory underpinning; but what the House of Commons has just agreed to put on the statute book may not be the underpinning that is required. The parliamentary and press brouhaha has been about setting up an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of widely held opinion, it fails to convince as drama. Desertion displays an academic’s self-consciousness about the story being told; and the sudden replacement of one cast of characters with another risks bucking the reader. But it is a well-judged form of self-consciousness, which ultimately pays dividends. The ...”

“... he tossed trash out the car and seemed to think this was a daring move.’ Ella’s idealised self can make whipped cream desserts with French names. But when they arrive in California they are at a loss, and adopt ‘a crooked, raw arrogance’ in response. Finally, they find a home in the San Fernando Valley, Lou opens a shoe-shop and Ella becomes ...”

“... poetics of ‘still extent’, of finding and growing, are related to his understanding that a self is never a self on its own (as he writes elsewhere, ‘To know the place you have to disturb it/With your touch’). Although he often dwells on the way things come together or come good, the activity or motion of his ...”

“... You can, however, rent out certain kinds of access to it. This, as Harvey writes, is a recipe for self-destruction. The influx of international capital produces homogenisation, or worse, Disneyfication. The Golden Jobby would disgrace the skyline of any city; there is nothing particularly ‘Edinburgh’ about it, or about the new shopping centre that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... When Marlowe met a different reckoning. He had been his usual snorting, railing, Blasphemous self, but loyal to his calling, As they all had to be, to live so well. He sang a noisy song before he fell, A dagger stuck in his eye after the feast As though the Cross had got to him at last. They saw each other home after his death. The rats had tired, the ...”

“... Helen says heaven, for her, would be complete immersion in physical process, without self-consciousness – to be the respiration of the grass, or ionised agitation just above the break of a wave, traffic in a sunflower’s thousand golden rooms. Images of exchange, and of untrammelled nature. But if we’re to become part of it all, won’t our paradise also involve participation in being, say, diesel fuel, the impatience of trucks on August pavement, weird glow of service areas along the interstate at night? We’ll be shiny pink egg cartons, and the thick treads of burst tyres along the highways in Pennsylvania: a hell we’ve made to accompany the given: we will join our tiresome productions, things that want to be useless for ever ...”

“... The self-appointed guardian of our streetstands all day in the doorwayof the house opposite,glaring at everyone who passes.His job is making sure the sun never shineson his side of Raleigh Street.He holds out his hand for rainand storm clouds gather to his cause.I spoke to him onceabout some misdirected mail I’d received,saying my own mail sometimes went astrayto nearby Raleigh Mews ...”