“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in order to signal and avoid an unwelcome thought. He settles on what may seem a rather narrow and self-regarding interpretation of what he calls his ‘disturbance of memory’. His doubt about getting to Athens, he says, ‘had to do with the strictures and poverty of our living conditions in my youth’. He didn’t think he would ‘come so far’, and the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It also evokes a deepening panic among America’s Anglophile ruling class. Wary of Jay Gatz, the self-made man with a fake Oxbridge pedigree, Buchanan is nervous about other upstarts rising out of nowhere to challenge the master race. Scott Fitzgerald based Goddard, at least partly, on Theodore Lothrop Stoddard, the author of the bestseller The Rising Tide ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was not a hypocrite in any conventional sense, in that his behaviour was neither primarily self-serving nor inconsistent. It was North’s sincerity that enabled him to subvert the institutions for which he worked, and turn them against their own principles. ‘His main moral fault was not that he failed to be true to himself,’ Thompson ...”

“... under these conditions was a sign of how bad things were. For some the solution lay in the self-disciplining of desire demanded by political lesbianism. But perhaps even lesbian sex offered no decisive escape: as MacKinnon suggested, sex under male supremacy might well be ‘so gender marked that it carries dominance and submission with it, no matter ...”

“... what they most fear? We may be tempted to read the moment in Germany as the most cynical form of self-protection, but the later moment reminds us that the most inappropriate, seemingly irrational forms of behaviour can surface during a war. People can be calm when they should be anxious, excited or inspired when they should be afraid. More simply, as our ...”

“... body (his chest, shoulders, abs) that speaks to hardness and training, not to say pride, poise, self-confidence, self-evidence, shamelessness, maybe even a steady (Nietzschean) provocativeness. And this, too, like the stone’s pink, is a quality in the figure – an overall character – that seizes you as you ...”

“... of rabbis and licensed moneylenders to the Habsburg emperors, and remained contemptuous of her self-made financier husband. She had been brought up in Vienna, for which, like many similarly placed ladies from the provinces, she yearned throughout her life. To annoy her and as a sign of protest against her attempts to cultivate a Viennese salon in ...”

“... which his attention to the non-human world represents apparently grows out of Simon’s previous self-centred fetishisation of meaning: ‘I’m expecting the Significant Thing in my life to show up, the vocation,’ he says, recalling James’s too-passive hero in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’. But the novel, though disturbing, doesn’t merely mime ...”

“... the adults politely call ‘affection’ is often irresistible to the child’s profoundly sensual self. It is this, along with their intense, sometimes daunting suffering, that adults find most unsettling about small children; their suffering can make the adults distraught, but their erotic pleasure always makes the adults awkward and uncertain. The ...”

“... fantastic diagnoses and cures; Freud’s almost unreserved reports on the progress of his own self-analysis together with his theoretical speculations at a time when most of the tenets of psychoanalysis were maturing in his mind, not to mention his use of Fliess as an object of analysis – all these are aspects of a collaborative enterprise unique in ...”