“... the legend. He did the first in the usual, recognisably Victorian way, from scratch, with terrific self-confidence, huge energy, astute focus and ferocious determination. He did the second by exploiting a singular gift for self-publicity: introduce a journalist and Edison would produce a soundbite. Some of them slid straight ...”

“... most famous, but there are many others: sometimes evidently foolish, sometimes worryingly lucid; self-righteous or ‘humble’; piously outraged or alarmingly dispassionate. None of them speaks for Swift. Readers have often imagined the author’s fury or disgust or horror, but without actually hearing his voice. And yet, at the end, he seemed to declare ...”

“... of distinct ideological and quasi-religious purpose, more aware of his limitations and his lack of self-confidence than of the recognition the world awarded. He now appears as a liberal bigot whom no socialist, Christian or conservative could consider non-partisan. Mrs Moorman’s book concentrates on the period before his return to Cambridge as Regius ...”

“... would bully us into accepting that in morality and aesthetics ‘stoic’ and ‘Horatian’ are self-evidently words of ill omen. A helluva lot of people through the centuries have thought them very honourable words indeed, as Peter Makin certainly knows. There is a brazenness about the manoeuvre which in an odd way I find engaging, as it is in the young ...”

“... in conduct. Swinburne repudiated Victorianism in the 1860s, and the Victorians were good at self-criticism: as G.M. Young pointed out, ‘the truth is that much of what we call Victorianism is a picture at second-hand, a satirical picture drawn by the Victorians themselves.’ This internal dialogue is the central preoccupation of Gallagher, who rightly ...”

“... from a male point of view. The feminine in his work is always the Other, in distinction to the Self, and understood from the outside rather than from within. But it is precisely from a dialectic between Self and Other that his plays are constructed. We should not, Bamber claims, be interrogating them for an answer to the ...”

“... at any earlier time in its history’. If Morgan provides ample ingredients for Labour’s self-examination, how far does he guide the Party towards reassessment? His political tastes limit what he can offer. He writes about people drawn from ‘the British political tradition in which I generally feel most comfortable’, and in several asides he ...”

“... were often subtle, and didactic in no baneful sense. Civilised conduct, which encompassed wit, self-humour and sociability, necessarily excluded bombast. And the presence of women in an active – at times a presiding – role contributed a new measure of incisiveness, sensibility and grace.’ One sees what it is: Steegmuller is beginning to paint an ...”

“... this vexatious flatulence, and therefore have troublesome nights.’ Johnson had his fair share of self-pity, though more on matters mental than physical. Self-pity has had a bad press lately, but someone who has no sorrow for themselves will hardly have pity on others. Johnson’s capacity to feel for himself can readily be ...”

“... flows unstaunchably. Though we repress this trauma, it persists within us as the hard core of the self. Something is missing inside us which makes us what we are, a muteness which resists being signified but which shows up negatively as the outer limit of our discourse, the point at which our representations crumble and fail. Lacan’s infamous ...”

“... the possibility of a ‘moral utopia’. While there was irony in the comment, he valued it as a self-reliant, resourceful and mutually supportive society, distant from the places of power and below the notice of official imagination. After he died, a book called Island Stories appeared, collated from his letters and articles, notes and fragments. It’s the ...”

“... over a plain blue dress and black socks. The socks, in particular, would have appalled her younger self. What was Nella wearing when she met Dr Elmer S. Imes, the man who would become her husband? I wish I knew. It was the summer of 1918. Larsen had worked at Lincoln Hospital throughout the Spanish flu epidemic, protected only by a gauze mask. Elmer was eight ...”

“... honest to yourself about yourself is good for you – which is I suppose what all narratives about self-realisation must be about. By contrast The Magician, which is not about coming out but about staying firmly in, occupies a much more complicated and neurotic world, in which Mann’s negation of his homosexual feelings is admittedly a kind of moral failure ...”

“... to appear in Blast. Lewis thought that people had had enough of all that. They did not want self-effacement. They wanted brilliant fellows like him performing stunts and letting off fireworks. ‘What’s the good of being an author if you don’t get any fun out of it?’ Ford told this story several times in several different ways, each time effacing ...”

“... delighting in bards and ballads, was happy, repeatedly, to style himself a ‘bard’, as well as, self-deprecatingly, ‘a bardie’ and, with mock immodesty, ‘my bardship’. By this time bards were everywhere – in England too. Thomas Gray, a Cambridge don, wrote ‘The Bard’; William Collins, in London, hankered after the ‘Old Runic bards’ of the ...”