“... background provides an unusual identity-humus. What he likes most about New York is its anonymity. Self-consciously nationalist intellectuals are often susceptible to cosmopolitanism: secretly (or in Said’s case openly) they feel most at home on the neutral terrain of exile and alienation. The very mechanism of identification – ‘standing up for’ a ...”

“... may or may not be activities of any consequence. This is what he has called a poet’s ‘virtuous self-mistrust’. His ‘September Song’, written to memorialise a child who died in the Holocaust, admits that vaunting and suffering may go together: (I have made an elegy for myself it is true) There are difficulties nonetheless with Hill’s enactment of ...”

“... Ian Campbell Ross’s new biography provides an introductory cameo of Sterne’s triumph of self-marketing. He made himself available to his admirers, the measure and embodiment of his fictional imagination. After a week he was writing home to say he was ‘engaged allready to ten Noble men & men of fashion to dine’. He loved performing in the drawing ...”

“... 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 now in Trier on von Trier. Discussing each of his films in turn, he emerges as a self-mocking and contradictory man of undisguised ambition, oscillating between shyness and exhibitionism. Most revealing is his antipathy to contemporary cinema. ‘There’s certainly something lacking in films today,’ he says. ‘A lot of what’s made is ...”

“... which is never complete and in which the Western I is involved in a continuous discovery of the Self in the Other. As a concrete example of this, Piault points to the work of Jean Rouch, his own mentor. For many, the octogenarian Rouch is the most accomplished ethnographic film-maker of his generation. He is certainly among the most prolific, having made ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to be her. All of itso lived in and lived among,so endlessly taken in by eye and ear,a record of self-sufficiency,historic click click no longer true.Deeded amateur landscapes, a printupside down, tweed linoleum in the kitchen,a foursquare Fifties desk.A lifelong orientation to light and colour,optimistic as a flower, or better yet, a leaf.Consolidated ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 & ...”

“... if I were a flesh-eating flower, Whereas actually I’m originally from St Louis. The performing self opens the stage door. I start my act. I feel like running for office. I feel like riding a fixed-wheel track bike for the simplicity. You’ll play the viola And I’ll play myself. Komm, süsser Tod Comes out of my mouth Like a tail coming out of a ...”

“... 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 ...”