“... must have written it. ‘The autistic mind, it was supposed at that time, was incapable of self-understanding and understanding others and therefore of authentic introspection and retrospection,’ Sacks wrote. ‘How could an autistic person write an autobiography? It seemed a contradiction in terms.’ As late as 2001, the epidemiologist Walter ...”

“... sanity would follow. How the crucial sense that we were all trying to break free of a collective self-deception played out still puzzles me. Among people I knew after I left school, there was a buzzing convergence between those on the left, with clear-minded things to say about false consciousness, and those who had come down the winding road of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... several, including Cecilia and Belinda, have significant relations to Clarissa; Mary Brunton’s Self-Control, from first chapter to last, constitutes a stage in the debate over seduction which, rightly or wrongly, always came back to Clarissa. It is plain that most interested women believed that Richardson had articulated the significant issues and laid ...”

“... Gilbert had let her know that he was reading her books on Emily. As his thin lips stretched to a self-satisfied smile, the long slits of his eyes narrowed. The effect was not altogether pleasant; his smile held an element of menace. And, right there, precisely when the reader might be tempted to roll her eyes, is a photograph of Cousin Gilbert, the long ...”

“... and one’s passion for human understanding changes to weariness and distaste. Open-minded, self-critical, conciliatory – it couldn’t last. Mailer’s later career wasn’t an exercise in dismantling the male ego. The most famous and successful venture in homosexual ventriloquism by a novelist is still Anthony Burgess’s Earthly Powers. I had ...”

“... ideas seem blindingly simple. Republican nationalism is by tradition committed to the right of self-determination of the people of Ireland. Suppose, however, that the people of Ireland, in exercising this right, decide that they intend to enjoy full control over their island only when a majority of those living in that part of the island known as Northern ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... That could only be done when men reformed themselves to do their duty to God, to neighbour and to self. More’s arguments, heavily salted with abuse after the manner of the time, are couched in Latin, so as to contain the dispute among those who could read that language: ‘Quid respondet frater, pater, potator?’ What answer from this crapulous father ...”

“... as a poem that seems to speak, with heightened eloquence, to the reader’. For Prins, the ‘self-defacing’ logic of Fragment 31 – the poet’s tongue is ‘broken’, yet through the art of the translator, who reconstitutes and reorganises her scattered parts, we seem nonetheless to hear her ‘voice’ – haunts Sappho’s literary afterlife as ...”

“... want Hawa to be? What must she be, to satisfy his research demands? We associate marginality with self-consciousness, with the possibility of critical distance; the outsider becomes a sociologist. Yet Hawa cannot be placed: she is not outside or inside, or between; her position is shifting, and everything around her is shifting. It is all rather a puzzle; in ...”

“... last stanza of ‘Water’ (1954) fuses priest and poet with a solemnity only faintly touched with self-mockery: I should raise in the east A glass of water Where any-angled light Would congregate endlessly. ‘Water’ and ‘High Windows’, written 13 years apart, are just alike enough in their endings to make their differences striking. The last lines of ...”

“... had writhed under his satire and resented what they saw as his systematic undermining of German self-confidence, were enchanted. What a downfall to relish! He, too, the mighty novelist accepted by the outside world as Germany’s political conscience, had hidden his past. But there are many more Germans who had used those early novels – The Tin Drum, Cat ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”