“... to hit the Statue of Liberty.’) Among Obama’s precursors is certainly Oprah Winfrey, the only self-made woman billionaire in America, who has built her television and magazine empire by assuming the role of an upbeat friend, helping you to help yourself. Obama’s slogan ‘Yes we can!’ is Oprah’s essential message; and it’s worth noting that some ...”

“... than pernicious.27 February. Good piece in this morning’s Guardian, a discussion between Will Self and Stewart Lee in which the latter describes the hostile reaction he sometimes has to face from audiences. At one point, ‘a guy got really angry. He said it wasn’t the audience’s fault they didn’t get what I was doing and I should be better at my ...”

“... for women. In this account people are always, but to varying degrees, enraged that they are not self-sufficient, that they aren’t omniscient, omnipotent gods; the happily dependent part of oneself thinks it is wonderful to live in a world in which people can do different things: the unhappily dependent part thinks, why can’t I do that? It couldn’t be ...”

“... punter, took ten years to write. It appeared in Australia in 1974, when Murnane was 35.A self-mythologising work of fiction, Tamarisk Row enfolds horse-racing, Catholicism and sin into the birth of its hero. Clement Killeaton is conceived the evening his father’s horse Clementia wins her maiden race, netting him a small fortune. Jean and Augustine ...”

“... fuzzy and so richly textured that they seem almost rotten. The stories move in such a private and self-sufficient way that they seem to leave no room for interpretation. It isn’t immediately clear how Schulz expects a reader to make contact. The clue is in the stories’ ambiguous relation to reality. Schulz is very fond of the seemingly innocuous word ...”

“... example – may be abstract, but they are not inert: they can provoke acts of violence or heroic self-sacrifice. From a philosophical point of view, the practical power of moral concepts has always been a bit of a mystery. Plato attributed it to the intrinsic attraction of the idea of the good, while anti-Platonists invoked long-range calculations of ...”

“... death in 2014, when a full collection of her poems appeared. Tonks loved Baudelaire in the same self-conscious way the young Patti Smith loved Rimbaud and Tom Verlaine loved his namesake. On the centenary of his death in 1967, she lay down next to his effigy in Montparnasse to confirm they were the same height, the king and queen of a rainy country.What ...”

“... that ‘seemed to be focused not on poems but on readers: they presented poetry as a species of self-help, a tool of personal growth like any other, valuable as a plumbable well of advice, reassurance and emotional uplift.’ Bucknell says that O’Hagan, along with other critics including Robert Potts and Mark Ford, saw this phenomenon as part of the ...”

“... at any point in the composition of the lines. Keats was a Romantic, an artist much concerned with self and selfhood. The sheer beauty of his fair copies seems a revelation, if not a celebration, of what he considers his own best self.At the other end of the spectrum, consider Twombly. Born in Lexington, Virginia in ...”

“... conditions for the uproar over the Gender Recognition Reform Act, which would have brought in self-identification for trans people. It was passed by the Scottish Parliament in December 2022 but subsequently blocked by Westminster. The bill, which was supported by the large majority of MSPs from all the mainstream parties at Holyrood except the ...”

“... to have around, which is the role I vaguely thought I filled.’ Motion calls this a ‘typically self-effacing judgment’ but it’s also a bit of a self-deluding one. It’s a short step from the jackboot to the book-jacket and by all accounts Larkin the librarian could be a pretty daunting figure. Neville Smith ...”

“... of the European Union since the end of the Cold War, and occasion for more or less unqualified self-congratulation, has left one inconspicuous thorn in the palm of Brussels. The furthest east of all the EU’s new acquisitions, even if the most prosperous and democratic, has been a tribulation to its establishment, one that neither fits the uplifting ...”

“... retiring! Less of the stately homes, horses, hunting, landowners, the young drunk rich ones so self-admiring. But John was ‘trade’ – don’t let’s forget it – he had to push to get there. No ancestors, no crest-embossed look.8 The world came, large, wild – he met it, like all loners, with that genuinely troubled ‘lost’ look. Further ...”

“... through life whipping itself until the blood oozes the chair just sits in a field of snow quiet & ...”

“... whose the powerThey are freezing to deathignored for now by the vicious hirelingswho blunt their techniqueson Arab prisonerstheir every translated plea a rusethey perfected in the mountainsand caves. Don’t be fooled.It’s rule or be ruled.You stupid sentimentalistswith your retro-neo existentialpalaver it means nothingtu-whit tu-whoo I’m singi ...”