“... make Mary Gordon seem to be endorsing an emotion that another writer might have chosen to see as self-pitying, self-dramatising, or simply untrue. Mary Gordon often seems to be almost a partisan of her characters, especially of their inner lives. The concern of the stories in Temporary Shelter is with the innermost areas ...”

“... words, the images, the gestures were ugly, but often gripping. The behaviour – gobbing, pogoing, self-immolation and fighting onstage, drink, drugs, throwing up in public – was stupid and horrible. But the kids just lapped it up. Some of them followed their heroes into speed habits, drink habits, cynicism, burn out and an early grave. But an awful lot more ...”

“... oddly complementary to Haydon’s: but what she found was salvation rather than martyrdom through self-mythologising in art. She was a woman for whom some form of public representation was inescapable and her disfigurement by smallpox – a great blow, thought contemporaries, to her husband’s career – made her painted image particularly difficult and ...”

“... the Ogonis and neighbouring minorities for a share of oil revenues, some measure of environmental self-determination, and economic redress for their oil-drenched environment. By the time Saro-Wiwa was executed, the Nigerian military and the Mobile Police Force had killed two thousand Ogonis – either they straightforwardly murdered them or they burnt their ...”

“... now you’re just like the rest of us” ... But I compare myself with my former self, not with others. I am far removed from when I have been my liveliest, most productive, most intense, most outgoing and effervescent.’ To be in the early stages of mania is intoxicating: to be ‘just like the rest of us’ is to be reduced and ...”

“... addicts we pursue that entertainment to our detriment.On the one hand, Wallace’s thesis seems self-evident now that the United States’s economy has striated into white-collar and service-oriented jobs, and its major growth sector is the merged ‘industries’ of entertainment and communications technology; on the other hand, it’s more than a little ...”

“... of charmed quarantine. It is a place where ‘the details associated with a socially specified self’ are stripped away. The ‘all-purpose pronouns “I” and “You” ’, which are the counters of the traditional lyric, are spaces for immediate free occupation. Readers go to novels, Vendler suggests, to inhabit socially-specific selves; but lyric is ...”

“... to the ‘ugly’ parts of the personality as the ones she least likes. By being carefully but not self-consciously written, her book manages to make a kind of common sense – masochism, for example, is ‘making the best of a bad job’; ‘a percentage of good manners is knowing what to do with one’s body in public’ – and yet in the shrewd lucidity of ...”

“... the selfless, virtuous, public-spirited unmasking of enemies of the Revolution, as opposed to self-interested sneaking to a tyranny, for which they used the older term, délation. Denunciation, in other words, is a good thing if the motives of the person doing it are selfless and the regime to which it is made is – in the eye of the beholder ...”

“... that Coleridge had behaved ‘wickedly’, Coleridge responding with a 5000-word fusillade of self-defence. What remains of a collaboration so briefly so inseparable is a verse tragedy, The Fall of Robespierre, written in two days. Southey benignly summed up: ‘He did me much good – I him more.’ He saved his parting shot for a review of Lyrical ...”

“... from courtly fabrics in order to make way for the initials of the new queen. The terrifyingly self-possessed women of the Pole family (the mother and sister of Cardinal Pole, whom Cromwell tries and fails to have assassinated) produce emblematic embroidery which entwines their family’s pansies with Princess Mary’s marigolds, and which, when the ...”

“... roots and was resolutely non-communist. In particular, he sought to develop the idea of workers’ self-management. He was part of what became known as the deuxième gauche (not to be confused with the Maoist and Trotskyist gauchismes of the 1970s), which had taken up some core ideas from 1968: a hostility to all bureaucracies and a celebration of individual ...”

“... agitation brought women onto the streets in unprecedented numbers. Both movements fostered self-confidence and a sense of entitlement; they gave women a political vocabulary in which to describe their experience. Live-in service came increasingly to be understood as no better than Victorian vassalage. Where other work was available, particularly in ...”

“... The present-day offence fails – signally – to differentiate between the intervener who, out of self-interest or perversion, helps to ensure that a suicide attempt succeeds, and the individual who, out of compassion, gives a rational fellow being the help he or she needs to end a life that has become medically unbearable. This is what the 1961 Suicide ...”

“... hoarding of insignificant objects, of their need to pass them on – to a loved one, to a future self, to an unknown posterity.In old age​ , her grandfather Nikolai became increasingly fixated on his own memories, time and again recounting to his daughter-in-law the same painful stories of his poverty-stricken childhood. Unlike Stepanova’s other ...”