“... imagination, within which his characters, acting in the belief that they are distinctive, self-driven individuals, reveal themselves to be subject to internal and external forces over which they have little or no control. This moment-by-moment melding together of the characters’ isolation and self-seeking, on the ...”

“... Andrew Knight was riding high. Most people lost their arguments with him. The key weapon here is self-deprecation. Deedes’s account of Conrad Black is somewhat similar, although written before he knew that the FBI had seized all Black’s hard disks: Deedes, indeed, is a bit like Robert Graves’s Claudius, surviving every situation while more powerful ...”

“... This was one of the cases that proved to be the undoing of the well-known alienist and self-publicist George Man Burrows (who had quite a stock of delusions of his own, among them that he could smell madness and detect a ‘maniacal odour’). He was given a keelhauling in the press for his arrogance and disregard for the liberty of the ...”

“... of large numbers of atoms. Examples of emergence include the hardness of crystals, the self-organisation of vast numbers of atoms that we know as life, and even the most fundamental laws of physics, such as Newton’s laws of motion. Emergence is said to occur when a physical phenomenon arises as a result of organisation among any component ...”

“... was probably closer to a good general definition than most professional critics when he identified self-ignorance as the crucial Romantic trait: ‘Romanticism has never been properly judged. Who would have judged it? The critics!? The Romantics, who show so clearly that the song is very rarely the work, which is to say the thought of the singer, sung and ...”

“... someone who has versified the 150th anniversary of Rochdale’s Co-Operative Society – is its self-imposed length. It is one thing to write a numerically regular poem like the brilliant but brief ‘Ten Pence Story’ (ten-syllable lines distributed among ten stanzas – the sort of poetry mathematics of which Peter Reading, an admirer of Armitage’s ...”

“... language, the insistence on something unrecognisable to set against the natural turpitude of the self. In his early years in England, Eliot liked to sign himself metoikos (‘resident alien’) in letters to journals, and was still calling himself a ‘spirit unappeased and peregrine’ by the time we get to ‘Little Gidding’, as if plain old ...”

“... where restoration of the balance of power was the best that could be hoped for. The principle of self-determination would now at last be realised across Europe. This was not to be an improvised affair. The British delegation’s composition and logistics had been calculated well in advance and to the finest detail by the Permanent Under-Secretary of the ...”

“... impressing the boy with a sense of the importance of his new name and, consequently, his new self: ‘All that school year I felt as if I had been chosen, and although, as I also knew, such a belief in no way matched my uncertain status, I have held fast to it almost my whole life.’ He spends most of his life, however, in ignorance of his ‘real ...”

“... was larger than the party and therefore beyond the party’s immolations, its self-stabbings,’ she thinks. She knows what’s going to happen, so we don’t get to hear the actual proceedings of the show trial that follows: there is none of the rhetoric, or the dialogue. Rose dismisses it all as ‘droning insinuation’, and walks out ...”

“... let the locations become labelled diagrams of historical forces or exotic backdrops for American self-exploration. And the narrative voice can be funny and gossipy as well as pained. In ‘Asian Tiger’, the golf pro, who gets a close-up view of money laundering and counterinsurgency, finds time to be dismayed by the Burmese generals’ blatant cheating on ...”

“... unfunny) courtroom jests recall the world of Albion’s Fatal Tree, with its smug, self-interested judges and their crushing response to property crime. Wit usually travels one way: from drolling judge to desperate malefactor, mirroring the imbalance of power in practice. Even the rare exceptions give the punchline to power. In the 1721 edition ...”

“... to be gilt, inlaid with little iron stars. Just like the members of the imperial family, or any self-respecting senator, he is a phenomenal self-publicist, but the kinds of achievement that are inscribed and celebrated all over his house are laughable, for example, a painted sequence of his life story commemorates, among ...”

“... great sophistication about the worrisome possibility that their visions and prophecies might be self-induced, self-validating or self-deceiving. Nicole Oresme, one of the greatest medieval mathematicians and philosophers, thought that most visionary experiences were the result of ...”

“... like a protest made from behind a teenager’s slammed door. How are we supposed to read Arvid’s self-absorption? Is his character the object of the novel’s analysis, or does he more straightforwardly embody the novelist’s own sensibility and intentions? The book amounts to one long accusation, directed at his mother, his wife, his brothers (who hover ...”