“... 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 ...”

“... threatens to live a shadow life as a gerund. Ammons’s early work is sometimes enervated by a self-watchfulness that borders on mannerism; his desire for a life ‘chilled in the attitude of song’ can lead to a sort of pinched imperviousness. When starting out, he proudly explained to an editor that ‘this slight indifference, unwillingness to be ...”

“... it himself? He retires from the force but lives on in San Francisco in what may be masochism or self-loathing. As Hitchcock depicts it, San Francisco is a steep, perilous place – and a character in the film. If the city is not the best place for him, does Scottie’s vertigo speak to a deeper uneasiness? Scottie is played by James Stewart (which would ...”

“... plastic individual truth immerged in beauty: whereas the scrap of science is for the time being a self-contained announcement of what is an ascertained fact – universally provable by those intelligent enough to comprehend it. You can’t prove a poem; it proves you.Although an early sonnet called ‘The Happy Encounter’ depicts Science as a ...”

“... about solipsism in Tolstoy’s world, ‘the simpleness and naturalness of the great open world of self-conceit which Tolstoy knew so well, the world of War and Peace in which solipsism is in reasonable accord with mutuality’. It is War and Peace, with its epic naturalness and its indebtedness to Pushkinian ‘lightness’ that clearly absorbs Bayley, much ...”

“... but the question of intention must be a false one. Under the microscope, the question of ‘self’ is so diffuse and so complicated that it might as well not arise. This is all unlucky talk. I am pregnant for the first time, the bump just beginning to show. I don’t know what my pregnant self is, either. The ...”

“... and rhythm: ‘The end of choice, the last of hope’, an effect so Larkinesque as to border on self-parody. Poetic metaphor flickers back into life … In stanzas six and seven metaphor stands on its head as the ‘real’, dull ordinary world takes on the glowing inaccessibility of a Grecian urn or mythical Byzantium: ‘Red brick, lagged pipes, and ...”

“... and physical sciences doesn’t mention him at all. Other books, more than a few of them self-published, link him with secret plots involving free energy, anti-gravity propulsion, the supposed technologies of the pharaohs, mind control and time travel. His most fruitful years coincided with the discovery of X-rays, radioactivity and the electron, and ...”

“... inheritor of the oldest continuous history in the world, whose underlying cultural unity and self-confidence are without equal. Long before the West, its rulers created the first modern bureaucracy, imbued with a Confucian outlook at once authoritarian and democratic, controlling domestic subjects more by moral education than force, and organising ...”

“... some days before the Fourth Plenum, when he responded to the charges against him with 11 points of self-defence, key among them that the students’ demands had not posed a threat to Party rule and that the crisis could have been settled peacefully if the other leaders had accepted his advice to withdraw the label ‘turmoil’ (i.e. riot) used in the 26 April ...”

“... operations aimed at ‘winning hearts and minds’ – as if these phrases were not shrouded in self-parody, as if the strategy they describe had not ended in catastrophe. Public memory is short. Outside policy circles, one might hope to find a richer repository of inconvenient truths. Yet here too the results are disappointing. A few novelists have made ...”

“... they are beyond the design flaws of humanity’, although the profits of the pharmaceutical or self-help industries might suggest otherwise. In Paris (where I live) he sees cartoon figures: ‘the men in salmon-coloured pants and white linen and bright sweaters tied around their necks, the men who disappeared around corners and circled back in luxury ...”