“... appeal to a succession of potential wives (his love-letters display an unendearing combination of self-pity, arrogance and wounded dignity), Malone seems to have resembled less the generous, self-effacing playwright whom he called his ‘MASTER’ than the most earnest servant, self-lover ...”

“... own teenage breakdown, feelings of intense despair and, according to her brother William, severe self-repression. Withdrawn and unhappy, he recalled, she gave up chess, ‘simply because it made her too eager for a win’. Whether it was the eagerness she feared or the winning, the poems that began to appear in her journals during these miserable years ...”

“... Meet the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, Gef the Talking Mongoose and, more prosaically, Doug and Dave, self-confessed manufacturers of crop circles. Thrill to ‘penis panic’ – five dead in Benin. If that’s too culture-specific, consider joining an epidemic of mass-psychogenic illness: dizzy spells and vomiting seem to be international in their appeal and ...”

“... bookish, and had been educated at home by ‘a long and dreary dynasty’ of governesses. Shy and self-conscious, sure that she ‘was not pretty’, she would rather have gone to Oxford than endure the rounds of fashionable parties: she had to ‘come out’ three times, in Florence, London and New York. She wanted to belong somewhere. Years later she would ...”

“... betrayals or fulfilments. ‘What remains of us is love’ in the sense that love equates with self-extinction. I think Larkin here gives his own entombed precision to the symbol, which for the Symbolists gave out nothing but its own powers of suggestion. To Larkin it suggests the comfort of disappearance, selflessness, awayness, and in the universe this ...”

“... aptly described by Caryn James as an ‘idealised version’ of Malcolm’s ‘journalistic self’, sometimes refers to her own life, but more often distances herself through impersonal observation, generalisation and literary allusion. She introduces the book with a remarkable Jamesian epigraph about ‘the reporter and the reported’ from his 1896 ...”

“... not ‘consent to any abridgment of the rights of American citizens in any respect. The honour and self-respect of the nation is involved.’ At stake was ‘the very essence of the things that have made America a sovereign nation. She cannot yield them without conceding her own impotency as a nation and making virtual surrender of her independent position ...”

“... John Myers, who was described by James Merrill as ‘an ageless, hulking Irishman with the self-image of a pixie’. They certainly didn’t consider themselves a ‘school’, but they were smart and talented, as were the painters associated with the gallery: William de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Philip Guston, Mark Rothko, Helen Frankenthaler, Jane ...”

“... of them. Merton’s first example – in retrospect a poignant one – of what he called ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ was a run on a bank: a rumour that a bank is about to fail causes depositors to seek to withdraw their funds, making what was actually a sound financial institution unsound. Alone among the commentators on LTCM, Dunbar notes Merton’s ...”

“... just like their characters in the film. Husbands may be taken as an auto-critique; it is also a self-indulgence. Ray Carney has been the keeper of the Cassavetes flame in the American academy. He thinks Cassavetes is the greatest and sees himself as the only one saying it. So he shouts it, he grabs you by the lapels and insists that you hear it. He ...”

“... collection of ‘Blue Labour’ thinking is as follows: ‘The Liberal-led coalition government, self-consciously progressive in orientation, while appropriating Labour’s language of mutual and co-operative practice, asks a fundamental question as to what distinctive gifts Labour could bring to this party.’ Not just a coalition, not just a coalition ...”

“... dir.’ As in most elegies, not least those in which men elegise their lovers, there is something self-regarding here. We learn considerably less about the dead woman than we learn about Douglas Dunn’s dead wife in his 1985 Elegies. Some readers may find it odd that the poem ends with the dead woman comforting the grieving husband; except that the German ...”

“... to conclude that if that were the case, one’s teeth would chatter constantly – out of sheer self-reflexive existential fear and trembling. (Subtext in these opening paragraphs: having inordinate if not Martin Amis-like dental bills of late – on top of all the moving expenses – have decided to come out as auto-odontophobe.) Life really would be ...”

“... reasons and seem to have been less inclined to treasure them for the instruction of posterity. Self-censoring, modest women may even have consigned the lot to the fireplace. Sex was more important than rank in determining epistolary competence in the 17th century. My own research confirms Whyman’s impression that even in the early 18th ...”

“... an unprepossessing child and the elaborate carapace of later years shielded a permanently bruised self-image. In her fifties, while being fêted on a tour in America, she remarked to an acquaintance: ‘I can’t stand myself. I’m so ugly.’ Her father’s attempts to improve her looks with back braces, nose pegs and a strict regime that prevented her from ...”