“... new ‘germ-conscious generation’, fleeing from their fathers with the help of bicycles, eagerly self-improving, anxiously attempting to improve others. But stronger than this is Flora Thompson’s own sense of separation from what she is viewing. Her position as post-office assistant is similar to that of the governess in a Victorian novel: sober and ...”

“... between fables, exempla, fairy-tales, jocular tales, nouvelles and nursery tales. Intolerant of self-indulgence (she doesn’t believe in fairies) and Peter Pannery, Dr Briggs investigates folklore in Shakespeare as a musicologist would examine folk-song in Vaughan Williams. She is not concerned to tell children stories, but in Abbey Lubbers, Banshees and ...”

“... never understand her horror of falsity. How does a biographer, accustomed to delve for a buried self, relate to a person who presents herself directly, without a mask? First and Scott record the events and emotions of Schreiner’s life with minute fidelity, but the living, brilliant-eyed woman escapes yet another attempt to pin her down. Her openness ...”

“... of Dutch art. In her book (and on its dust-jacket) there is a good colour illustration of a self-portrait and still-life painted by David Bailly of Leiden in 1651. A young artist (is it too ingenious to suggest that it represents Bailly himself as a young man?) holds Bailly’s portrait on a table where a wide variety of other works of art appear ...”

“... of structure which sometimes becomes merely lax. It may seem unfair to remark that there are self-indulgent passages of this kind in ‘Monday June 26th 1916’, since Strachey’s declared purpose there was to record the events of a single day, abjuring ‘selected realisms’ in the hope of capturing ‘its minuteness and its multiplicity and its ...”

“... a saint or cynic ever was    The theme of praise: a hermit would not miss Canonisation for the self-same cause,    And wherefore blame gaunt Wealth’s austerities? Because, you’ll say, nought calls for such a trial; Then there’s more merit in his self-denial. He is your only poet ... Perhaps. But during the ...”

“... Piers, whose identity exists to stage and shape that of others, finds his freedom from self in the dramatic energy of Vanbrugh, and so has the name nicked down to ‘Van’. The great house is sparsely populated by their great-grandfather, by his daughter-in-law (their grandmother), and by their pompous circumstantial uncle. Their widowed ...”

“... awareness among the other Chilean students of its psychological aftermath, makes Richard’s self-obsession seem rather pathetic, but Tóibín chooses not to offer the reader a moment even of denied awareness on his part. One section ends with a fellow student’s account of Raul’s torture: ‘He told them the names of his grandparents first, they were ...”

“... enthusiast for pretentious sentences and bogus science, and someone who whinged with unattractive self-absorption about the difficulty of writing anything, when no one was asking him to anyway. But what makes ‘Chatwin Revisited’ an honest homage and not just an assassination is its author’s unillusioned estimation, as a fellow travel-writer, of his own ...”

“... because the tales themselves can be fairly anodyne. Biff, bash, lolly, champagne, nick. Little self-reflection. Most criminals would think self-reflection was a design fault in a pair of Raybans. Reynolds has avoided these pitfalls because he has managed some self-reflection during his ...”

“... top five American titles (behind Mamba Mentality by Kobe Bryant and ahead of Burn after Writing, a self-help book composed of mostly blank pages with writing prompts meant to prevent oversharing on social media).The publishers bidding for American Dirt were responding to an ambient yearning for books and movies that combine popularity, commercial ...”

“... New Hampshiremen Robert Frost and e.e. cummings. Creeley’s work is characterised by a tortured self-examination, and an almost panicky need to engage with interior experience by enacting it syllable by syllable, as if any misstep will send the whole poem up in flames, and perhaps its maker too. This is the poem’s drama, and it hardly ever seems ...”

“... the government busy at work’. The mise-en-scène may be modest science fiction, but the mode is self-conscious post-Chandler noir. The narrator is Conrad Metcalf, a down-at-heel private eye – the ‘I’ in this case standing not for ‘investigator’ but ‘inquisitor’ – with low karma, less cash and an unhealthy make habit. His sex life has been ...”

“... rush of cinematic violence, but it’s driven by Arm’s turbulent inner life, a mix of tough-guy self-assurance and clumsy longing.Asked by an interviewer why all the stories in his first collection focused on young men, Barrett admitted it was ‘a limitation’. His new book shows his efforts to expand his range. Women are at the centre of a couple of the ...”

“... of a threatening natural space for a protective chapel ‘evokes sanctuary in a paradoxical, self-cancelling form’. The connection may seem far-fetched, but Gawain raises questions about the meaning of sanctuary vis-à-vis the natural world. Like the miracle of the stag, it asks whether human institutions such as kingship, covenant and sanctuary can ...”