“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Wyndham Lewis’s Modernism refuses a provincial label. His intellectual toughness and taste for self-promotion and polemic were foreign to the amateurishness that, he believed, vitiated Bloomsbury’s insular Post-Impressionism. Vorticism, the movement he set up with Pound and others around 1913 after a break with Roger Fry, would probably have had a short life even if the war had not intervened ...”

“... celebrities write the most interesting books: Robert Browning’s Pauline, for example, was self-published and, Browning later boasted, didn’t sell a single copy. Moss says that Rushdie and McEwan’s new books ‘will be the publishing events of September’, but that’s not the same thing as the best novels, and I would read The Devil’s Larder by ...”

“... of all the novelists and of all their characters, issues an unquenchable whine of unction and self-pity, which is varied only by the grinding hum (as of bluebottles busy with a summer turd) of rancorous complaint. The grievances of homosexuals, like those of unmarried mothers or the Leyland workers, are interminable and unassuageable. ‘The hearties ...”

“... It could look like a retreat from the reality of war – Ravilious was more than once accused of self-indulgence. A refusal to be shaken out of a degree of disengagement was far from unique; it can be found, for example, in Jocelyn Brooke’s fictional/autobiographical trilogy, for which Ravilious’s watercolours would be appropriate decorations.What is ...”

“... salesmen and others who ply the road – are often imbued with a solitary stoicism, a kind of self-sufficient melancholy.’ There are those for whom the main road between Scotland and England was more essential to society – James Boswell, for instance, who, in November 1762, travel­led the near­ly four hundred miles in a cold chaise, putting in at ...”

“... Solomon’s SealShaded by the self-seeded hazelsIn a back corner of our garden,To the right of the flowering currantAn unexpected Solomon’s sealI want to show you. Does it matterWhy such graceful bells are so called(Seals of a medieval document?)It’s May, and Solomon says: Rise up,My love, my fair one, and come away,Winter is past, the rain is overAnd gone, flowers appear on the earth ...”

“... We were sitting with friends. It was a sunny day. We were boasting about the local coffee. Strange self-congratulations, flat whites. These were friends we had only recently found our way back to. For a long time we were far apart. Did you all survive? On that first day of school, I mostly remember being terrified: the dark interior, the children in rows at ...”

“... kept swimming away, resolving, among the tracks of mink and geese, while the lull I mistook for a self decayed into ...”