“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Samuel Huntington, the Harvard professor and self-styled defender of Western civilisation, has been a dominant voice in American political science for thirty years. Roughly contemporary, as a Harvard graduate student in security studies, with Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Huntington failed to achieve their spectacular level of success in Washington, although he did rise to a second-tier position in the National Security Council under President Jimmy Carter ...”

“... institutions and social change. Rational Choice theory presents us with instrumentally rational, self-interested agents. It sounds as if such individuals, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, will never contribute to the common weal unless they gain more than they pay. Indeed, since each calculates in terms of his marginal costs and his ...”

“... readers who found the polemics of the two Vindications too rugged were delighted by the melancholy self-portrait of the Letters. All the same, there is a lot more to them than subjective egotistical Romanticism, or the delineation of a wandering female writing to a faithless lover. The thread of interest is always a double one, and the outer world is more ...”

“... The traditional self-contained, sensibly-proportioned novel, still very much the dominant influence on today’s literary scene, is called gently into question by each of these writers. Carey Harrison, with ostensibly the second (although in fact the first) volume of what looks set to become a monumental tetralogy, puts pressure on the boundaries of the form by insisting that it absorb a near-infinity of characters, events and incidental detail ...”

“... modern guru, in spite of his occultism, in that what he offered was not simple salvation, but a self, that 20th-century Grail. Ignore your ‘personality’, be taught and find your real self. His most famous follower (though not for long), Katherine Mansfield, wrote when she joined his community shortly before her ...”

“... to haunt her.’ Much of Barker’s fiction is involved with that attempted exorcism. This self-reflectiveness carried with it the hazard of repetition, and Regeneration, published in 1991, consciously broke a compulsive pattern. It was a historical novel, based on the work of the Army psychologist W.H.R. Rivers, who treated Siegfried Sassoon and ...”