“... 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 ...”

“... would be fair. Perhaps none of that is our business. There are no end of families badly treated by self-obsessed individuals who have made great and lasting contributions to the wider world. The personal failures ought not to detract from an assessment of the work. But there is a question to be asked of a purveyor of wisdom who displays none in his dealings ...”

“... letters, more convincingly argued that Thomas equally wished to preserve his marriage, and that self-blame (as ever) dominated his state of mind. Edward Thomas’s obsessions were rarely monorail: they exhausted all the possibilities and exhausted him. Frost conceived ‘The Road Not Taken’ as a satire on his friend’s scrupulosity about the ...”

“... which might well have led him, had he kept his health, to have given up writing poetry altogether. Self-criticism never really helped him, and he could not see how the incongruous factors in ‘St Agnes Eve’ nonetheless worked together to make it the kind of masterpiece adored by the Victorians. Porphyro, ‘brushing the cobwebs with his lofty plume’ in ...”

“... British coal then suffered a decline in production and employment so nicely paced, and a series of self-inflicted wounds so exquisitely contrived, that the Second World War and the period of reconstruction which followed were marked by one continuing crisis of productivity. Though some sort of stability was seemingly restored to a steadily shrinking ...”

“... class oppression for overt war, while announcing the imminent arrival of the freedom, justice and self-fulfilment preached by the idealists. What do these ancient arguments have to do with the world of Ruling Performance, with David Pannick’s reflections on the English judiciary, or with Vernon Bogdanor’s Encyclopedia of Political Institutions? For one ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... lesser eccentricity; the rumours that he fed his children a diet of potatoes to accustom them to self-denial and habitually ate his own dinner in dyspeptic solitude are vehemently denied: all these tales are traced back to a disgruntled former nurse. To compensate for the loss of these gratifying slanders, Barker supplies innumerable instances of ...”

“... a great many middle-class intellectuals of the post-war period find useful for the purposes of self-definition.’ Yes, I would have been tempted to think Lodge was over-egging it too, if I’d happened to read his essay only a couple of months ago. But then I read High Fidelity, and started seeing exactly what Lodge meant. Just look back at the very top ...”

“... Shaw before him, he has obviously been convinced by his own brilliance. There are few signs of self-doubt here. He begins with a strong affirmation about the importance of ‘the battle of ideas’, suggesting that parties which win it can ‘stay in office for a generation’. Yet he maintains that, even after 18 years in government, ‘Conservatives can ...”

“... of art after 1923 (a partial one, as it turned out) is attributed here to his conception of the self as an essence that is sullied by the process of creation. (Chess was a cleaner alternative – what was visible exactly mirrored the thought behind it, itself subject to preordained rules.) Seigel also invokes the bohemian tradition of declaring oneself an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... southern Argentina. And he is certainly not the embodiment of Indian aspirations for justice and self-realisation: ‘After several hours we were forced into conversation with the only other white people on board, the only people we could talk to since the wary Indians offered no more than monosyllabic replies to questions from outsiders. In fact, these kids ...”

“... 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 ...”