“... 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 ...”

“... wings on the water Of an absolute take-off. Half the world has gone south – It’s winter now. Self-insulated, Deathless, last of the early Irish hermits, I lift the hatch like a desktop And light floods in, A giant scriptorium, Sky and water. Antrim to the east, Its reef of lights. And the dot-dash-dot Of a pollan fleet, on the far horizon. And the ...”

“... the Lady’s Tower aren’t quite rare enough to acquire significant market value, much like the self-taught experts in autobrecciation and exfoliation weathering who work their way to the surface of the Coastal Path at the close of a hard winter. Amateur geologists, rockhounds, and collectors may be distinguished by commitments to task-specific ...”

“... and bustle that you claim to want in the young. I am visible but not heard: distracted and nearly self- sufficient introverts, I and mine never meant any trouble. We hide our eggs; we work the third shift half the time, and give your cleaners the harmless slip even before they know it … But now I think I’ve figured out what bugs you. We have seen you ...”

“... I left the protectionof my plan & mythinking. I let my selfgo. Is this hope Ithought. Light fled.We have a worldto lose I thought.Summer fled. Thewaters rose. How do I organisemyself now. How do Ifind sufficientignorance. How do Inot summariseanything. Is this mystery,this deceptively complexlack of design. No sumtowards which to strive. No general truth ...”

“... municipal baths in another town and glance across the blue-grey of the park to where the better self I meant to be glides quietly, length by length, to his own ...”

“... in the third person. Perhaps the habit satisfied a psychological need to split the writing self from the betraying self, as if he were a novelist inventing an unattractive alter ego. Later, in the 1940s, Tranquilli was admired by the American secret services for the extraordinary precautions he took to disguise his ...”

“... part in play-readings of Wesker’s work at school. At Doris’s I read Laing’s The Divided Self and The Self and Others, and found a good deal in them that chimed with my experience of a mad nuclear-family life. I was aware of being on show, and was very cautious. I took the opportunity my novelty gave me to find out ...”

“... to us that social attitudes towards sex and gender minorities, and the concomitant right to self-determination, were shifting. Nonetheless, at GIDS a diagnosis of gender dysphoria alone did not lead to a particular pathway of care. We knew that for some young people a period of transgender or non-binary identification, coupled with intense body ...”

“... characters, Rajah Amar is gradually and unexpectedly moved into the centre of the action. Buddhist self-discipline has brought him to the point where he feels fitted for withdrawal from the world – once he has fulfilled his last responsibility of committing his small principality to a political alignment that his wife Sita can maintain during their son ...”

“... a challenge to the poet and a kind of guarantee of his poethood. To cut your throat, to die by a self-inflicted Pasternakian haemorrhage, is not necessary if the state will do it for you. The sense of solitude, the acute consciousness of self, is as marked in Lowell or Plath as in these Russians. But the powerful state ...”

“... writing, positing a person like yourself in some ways, in others completely not. For a writer as self-conscious as Wallace, and so ethically acute, this would never be a straightforward process. In her essay on Wallace in Changing My Mind, Zadie Smith noticed his tendency to ‘romanticise the pure relations’ the wistful intellectual likes to imagine to ...”