“... settled into the comforting mythology of the heroism of the Charge of the Light Brigade and the self-sacrifice of Florence Nightingale’? Surely the whole point of the Light Brigade story is that ‘someone had blundered.’ I can detect little eagerness to cover up the extent of the failures either then or now. As early as 23 December 1854 – before the ...”

“... can it be autonomous? And who judges such autonomy, if not a reader? How can literature be at once self-communion and communication? Henry James, the subject of Author, Author, was perhaps the first major novelist in England to confront this dilemma head-on, living as he did at a transitional point between Victorian writers, for whom it was still possible to ...”

“... both born commoners, crowned themselves Shah and ended up in exile, broken men – like that other self-crowned emperor, Napoleon. It seems now to have been forgotten that Reza Shah too was shunted around in exile, prevented from going where he wished to go. Forced off the throne by the Allies to secure access to Iranian oil during the Second World War, Reza ...”

“... the Anti-Rightist campaign in the later part of 1957, and so forced Mao to claim in retrospective self-justification that his permissive Hundred Flowers policy had been no more than a trap to trick the regime’s enemies into exposing themselves. There is an article in the People’s Daily of 19 January this year attributing this 1957 campaign simply to ...”

“... confessions’ which are not – non-spoiler alert – particularly confessional. A champion self-advertiser, maven of the brag and the humblebrag, he announces in the first pages: ‘Maybe, if I don’t do anything else, I shall send out the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed.’Born to a working-class family, Whitman fashioned ...”

“... with days in fetters, weeks in solitary confinement or the whip. These years were crucial to his self-mythology; the most famous image of him on the islands depicts him in chains, forced to turn a heavy oil press in the sun. This is the picture on the cover of the ‘Veer Savarkar’ edition of the popular children’s comic Amar Chitra Katha, published in ...”

“... in defiance of his Sidenius heritage. Challenged by his ‘own soul’ to ‘renew his search for self-awareness’, Per gradually loses interest in the sunny but superficial Nanny, and turns to her older, quieter, ‘frightfully scrawny’ sister, Jakobe. Jakobe is as troubled as Nanny is carefree, aware of the antisemitism around her, already disappointed ...”

“... from the fact that he was the same bullying braggart on stage and off. He didn’t hide his true self from the voters. Harris discovered that this was not the case. ‘I’d readied myself for a phone conversation with Mr Hyde,’ she writes. ‘But Dr Jekyll had picked up the call.’ In other words, the man is a hypocrite. But Harris doesn’t say what an ...”

“... could be x-thousands, peppered with I’s’. As a compromise, we have this kebab: fatty scraps of self-revelation alternating with more substantial portions of fiction. Personal privacy is clearly a valued property of Barker’s and one which sometimes seems at odds with her mission as creative writer, let alone ...”

“... for production values, something simpler and more sympathetic was beginning to stir. With more self-analysis, might David Selznick have made better movies? Ronald Haver asks no such question. He spends as little time exploring Selznick’s feelings as he does evaluating his films or examining why Gone with the Wind wowed Middle America. When he does refer ...”

“... of a bathroom cabinet. This is a corner of America in a mood of complacence ample enough to admit self-criticism, provoked in particular by the oil crisis and the queues at petrol stations. Flags are at half-mast for the hostages in Iran. God, who used to be present to Harry in his childhood, has withdrawn, ‘giving Harry the respect due from one well-off ...”

“... had coexisted with the still sad music of humanity because both were to be perceived outside the self; but the internal voice of imagination that replaced the One Life was too loud – too dominant when in full song, and at other times too threatened – for the poet to do much listening. At these times he was indeed the ‘spectator ab extra’ that ...”

“... area of initiative in the field of schooling’ that was left to the working class. Self-taught men, or disabled workers able more or less to read and write, could set up as teachers. (Parents, too, might exercise initiative: in a Scots mining village a succession of dominies was expelled with showers of stones.) More books were becoming ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... else in the lobby is a giant lizard. Material which in other hands would be solipsistic and self-serving – there is, after all, nothing as boring as other people’s drug stories – has always been anchored by Thompson’s journalistic skill. His gift for reporting, his humour and political sense have made his ‘gonzo’ version of the New ...”