“... of a dissolute father and an unstable mother, he was born with a club foot, which always made him self-conscious,’ he says of Byron; and of Dickinson, no less winningly: ‘She was reclusive, tended to wear white clothing, which was thought odd, and scarcely left her bedroom in her later years.’ Such things strike a whimsical note, but usually Carey’s ...”

“... of the 19th century and as far from a good Samaritan as anyone could imagine. Restell was a self-publicist on an epic scale who was said to possess an ‘inordinate greed for money’. She marketed herself as an exotic Frenchwoman with decades of training in women’s medicine when she was really a seamstress from a small town in the Cotswolds who never ...”

“... and magnificence. For Lear to be stripped of his train of a hundred knights was for his royal self to be publicly undone: the servantless master, like the masterless man, became, in a profound sense, ‘nothing’.The idea of the servant’s personality being absorbed by the persona of his master helps to explain how the vocabulary of service was so ...”

“... who was a literate man, shows something of the same ambition, the same nerve, the same boisterous self-confidence. But the Sonnets inscription has more than this to provoke thought. Either T.T. or Mr W.H. is in some sense so much in touch with Shakespeare’s work as to seem to be in touch with Shakespeare too. The ‘ONLIE.BEGETTER.’ is a case in ...”

“... information, merely associative, are here used to create the work’s meaning. In Mark Quinn’s Self, a Saatchi example, the fact that the frozen head is a cast of his own, and is made of solid blood, and his own blood, and a full nine pints of it – none of this visually evident – are important points of attention. You have to have them. And this is ...”

“... be grappled with. Covid-19 has exposed the world’s greatest democracies as victims of prolonged self-harm; it has also demonstrated that countries with strong state capacity have been far more successful at stemming the virus’s spread and look better equipped to cope with the social and economic fallout.Germany, which successfully used a low-tech test and ...”

“... contact with the alien life assumed to be strewn throughout the galaxies, and glows with a self-ratifying ‘Sense of Wonder’. This movement, exemplified by names like Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke, SF’s sturdy dead-white-guy canon, is where a fascination with technology and the future became mashed up with American exceptionalist ...”

“... more than a day at most. She must think of it as one day at a time. She must look composed, sexy, self-contained; mustn’t look needy and impatient for the others to arrive; must look like someone who can look after herself. While taking care at all times to act natural. What that meant in the short term was that she should make some breakfast. She hadn’t ...”

“... partly because of his lack of a Wordsworthian or Hazlittian egoism, his permanent and self-knotting tentativeness, something in the work will baulk or turn aside any reader. Hence the quality of the incomplete and the defeating that characterises Coleridge’s enormous body of work. Editing Coleridge is a heroic way of life. Until now, there has ...”

“... her all that she would need. Something else happened. She had asked for it. Jove in his thorough self made love to her. His lightning burned her flesh, ousted her breath. She lay as ashes with the Thunderer. One legend says she went to hell for this. Another saves her inexplicably. She is last seen with what she wanted most: A baby god and ...”

“... light the stranger’s way. The hero who has come to kill Asterion: her half-brother, my son. My self. They betray each other so perfectly: husband to wife, wife to husband; sister to half-brother, and now lover to lover. The symmetries of chaos and bliss. The mysteries. I am the true vine, I am the fennel stalk; and he will be honey: buried to the ...”

“... expectingto become a river of selves, of dis-appearing selves, us allstepping again now into the self-erasingcrowd, the airfull of receipts, of tips, of signals by whichwe are expecting to bechanged. It glides. It carriesme. Ever more alive. I made sureI never had to seethe horizonagain I think – I did – I did itvoluntarily, I think I did ...”

“... novel of initiation and development, in the course of which a young hero is led from adolescent self-absorption and egocentricity on the margins of the social world through a variety of instructive experiences – often a mixture of the erotic and the aesthetic – to a state of adulthood and responsibility at the centre of contemporary ...”

“... that the diarist is not immune from the effects of hindsight, ignorance, partiality, bias and self-justification in what he writes. In Crossman’s case, these distortions are not disabling. He is singularly free from self-deception and his candour often punctures his own pretensions. For instance, the ‘pretty good ...”

“... they supposedly tell about the gods.The distinction between fiction and lies seems more or less self-evident now. In the words of Bernard Williams, a lie is ‘an assertion, the content of which the speaker believes to be false, which is made with the intention to deceive the hearer with regard to that content’. That makes it relatively easy to ...”