“... by rewriting his letters for publication, a deft editorial feat which transformed whining self-pity into manly resolution. But he could hardly disguise the mutability of his religious allegiances. Educated by Jesuits, he switched to Lutheranism in 1572, when a professorship at Leiden offered him an escape from his troubled homeland. By 1575 he was ...”

“... literature then leaving the presses: he was rude, opinionated, intolerant, arrogant, egotistic, self-inflating, even megalomaniac. He could think and talk only of himself, one heard, refused to admit that he had ever made a mistake or that any of his plans developed in a way he had not foreseen, and arrogated to himself all credit for any success achieved ...”

“... rather briefly. He interprets Robinson Crusoe as being about the need to learn ‘moderation and self-restraint’ and the art of pursuing ‘ease and safety’. The ‘real crux of Crusoe’s moral sensibility’, Sill says, is ‘how to judge when to venture and when not to venture’. This, according to Sill, was also Defoe’s recipe for Britain’s ...”

“... George Orwell was one of the great self-mythologisers. He sought out extreme experiences, was a policeman in Burma and a pauper in Paris and London, lived among unemployed workers in the North of England and among soldiers in Spain, and then turned those hard adventures into fables of imperialism, poverty and war ...”

“... the neurologist concluded: ‘Not that it makes any difference we know about.’ In her relatively self-effacing preface to Slouching towards Bethlehem Miss Didion admitted: ‘whatever I write reflects, sometimes gratuitously, how I feel.’ Ten years on, the emphasis has changed; you might even say, after 200 pages of these high-profile musings, that ...”

“... from that world. He was not a bit like Tolstoy or Turgenev, always immanent in what they wrote, self-creating, self-justifying. He was more like his own hero Pushkin, from whom he drew such inspiration, in the way he could get the most out of his subject, find the right objective scenario for the point to be made. As an ...”

“... he does a tremendous job: this is a convincing argot for the age in question. The suffering and self-conscious first-person singular manifested in Dyer could be considered a creation of the Gothic novel that came after him, and Dyer can also bring to mind the magus of a time before. But there is no nagging sense of anachronism. How could there be? the novel ...”

“... reason to resist if they can’. Note that, by ‘Sufficient reason’, Nagel means, not ‘self-interested reason’, but ‘good reason’, or ‘justification’: the rich plainly have a self-interested reason to resist what he thinks they could not reasonably (that is, with good reason) resist and the poor a ...”

“... scholarship and indeed of English letters. It has some occasional irritants, an overheated self-concern, a raw sense of personal slight, a dogged self-indulgence which, as at pp. 302-303, will make a bad joke, apologise for it in a note, thank a reader of the manuscript for pointing it out, keep it in for the sake of ...”

“... in Capital and Ideology are often framed as the products of decisions and choices. They are self-interested projects, projects that can fail. Piketty’s analysis of an extraordinary range of inequality regimes – from what he calls ‘ternary’ or ‘trifunctional’ societies (feudal, in a broad sense, composed of clergy, warrior/nobility and ...”

“... space to learn to love what I describe in various ways throughout the book as my Black girl weirdo self,’ Phillips writes. Another way in which Solange matters: her excursions into art and literacy and fashion have her speaking in a different way, in different places, to new audiences. Her now frequent art-world projects make her a kind of Bowie figure for ...”

“... and strength of will. Whereas Gertrude Bell (as Ms Goodman observes) very rarely exposes her inner self in her writings, Freya’s great pre-war journeys are essays in self-exposure and self-revelation. It is partly this quality, and its attendant ...”

“... his normal creations. The mirror he holds up in autobiography is not to nature but to his fictive self.’ Banks is struck by how few photographs of Coppard exist: ‘He seems to have kept himself out of the camera’s way, no doubt deliberately.’ And despite more than a hint of self-regard, the autobiography conceals as ...”

“... leaves to quicken a new birth!’ he implored in ‘Ode to the West Wind’ (1819). It’s a self-aggrandising request but also a self-effacing one: he’s asking that his thoughts be carried away on the air so they can be brought down to earth and turned into compost. The poem ends with an optimistic rhetorical ...”

“... commentary on what was ill-done is revealing in this respect: When she was writing the poetry of self-abandonment she really abandoned herself with the valour and decision of an anchorite abandoning the world. Such a couplet as:     Our Euripides, the human,     With his dropping of warm tears, gives to most of us a sickly and nauseous ...”