“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”