“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”