“... character. Clearly, this business is getting on my nerves. Perhaps I have embarked on a voyage of self-discovery. In any case, Miss Voigt doesn’t reply. Nor is my wife prepared to keep me company. ‘You will not enjoy this,’ she says, with the confidence of someone who is in a position to know. ‘And I do not wish to hear the things that you will say ...”

“... to whom it all ‘seems’) shape the narrative of the poem. The tension between the self who desires and the self who notices, often fudged in translation, has been an essential element in the influence of Sappho’s poem on later writers of lyric. For Carson, what matters is Sappho’s poetry, not her gender ...”

“... changed so profoundly by illness or accident that each called into question the solidity of the self. We were not one, continuous, indivisible whole, but instead, hundreds of separate subsystems, with changes in any one sufficient to disperse the provisional confederation into unrecognisable new countries. Who could take issue with that? No one, at that ...”

“... and mutter about the ambiguity of his moral lessons. Lamartine winced at his cynical promotion of self-interest, and for Rousseau the method employed by the fox to relieve the crow of its cheese was as much an advertisement for flattery as a warning against flatterers. But though they mistook his observations of human behaviour for universal precepts, La ...”

“... to return, and it took the acuity of Ronald Syme in History in Ovid (1978) to perceive the self-assertion and protest behind the screen. Ovid knew that in Augustus he was dealing with a reader paranoid enough to beat any postmodern advocate of a hermeneutics of suspicion, but cumulatively over the years he constructs a narrative that reproaches the ...”

“... to porn in a page, from raddled lust to a sense of its abject absurdity (Mickey Sabbath’s self-mocking epitaphs in Sabbath’s Theatre, or most of Rabbit’s antics). Oates’s fictional worlds are too harsh for belly laughs or even wry smiles. In her latest novel, The Tattooed Girl, Oates appears to respond to the comparisons made between her work ...”

“... to negotiate the transfer of power from the British colonial master, only to discover that these self-styled nationalists appeared more intent on sleeping with the master’s daughter than liberating their people: ‘I recall one publicly humiliating instance: a national figure, a truly revered name in a highly sensitive political position. He got so carried ...”

“... a militant group in the devastation of the post-Oslo moment for those in Gaza to whom promises of self-governance were never made good; the formation of other groups of Palestinians with other tactics and goals; and the history of the Palestinian people and their aspirations for freedom and the right of political ...”

“... Review addressed itself to ‘serious, thoughtful men of all schools, classes and principles’, self-consciously distancing itself from the openly partisan character of most leading periodicals of the time. It made something of a fetish of its political, religious and financial independence, while taking evident pride in its hard-headedness. It ...”

“... took an interest in socialism and Irish nationalism as a young man, but abandoned them after his self-exile to continental Europe in 1904. From then on it was art that preoccupied him. He made no public comment on the Easter Rising in 1916, and for the most part held himself aloof from Ireland’s struggle for political independence.Frank Callanan, a ...”

“... designs on the play. It leans, that is to say, too heavily on time as a circumstance outside the self. Early in Cymbeline, Posthumus, exiled in Rome, is asked what he will do to help himself, and he answers that he plans nothing but to ‘abide the change of Time,/Quake in the present winters state, and wish/That warmer dayes would come’. The gentleness is ...”

“... us. Something says nonstopare you hereare your ancestorsreal do you have abody do you haveyr self inmind can you see yrhands – have you broken itthe thread – try to feel thepull of the otherend – make sureboth ends arealive when u pull totry to re-enterhere. A ravenhas arrived while Iam taking all thisdown. In-corporate me itsquawks. It hopscloser ...”

“... too non-specific for relevance. It was November when I made these notes, then in absentminded self-disgust set out on the path from Crail, and by sunset, at four, could neither return nor make Kingsbarns before dark. Though no one knew where I was, real danger lay elsewhere. No cows even. Just sleepless fields staring skyward and the firth prowling ...”

“... leaving Wittenberg for a court grown purulent? He found himself unemployed, at best the self-appointed professional mourner. Offstage, Poland is racked with unrest. Four centuries later, Andrzej Wajda films Hamlet in gabled Cracow, where Faust (real and imagined) plied his dreadful trade; His legend, Hamlet’s, Bruno’s and that of Poland lives ...”

“... anyway, our dragon sits in style atop a glowing treasure-stack, and with the cool, expansive self- possession of his kind, grins extravagantly back at the blaze that enriches ...”