“... Vanishing act – through dowel-holes in the wreck – Into bottles but without a message, only Self-effacement in sand, additional eddies. There’s no such place as heaven, so let it be The Carricknashinnagh shoal or Cahir Island where you honeymooned in a tent Amid the pilgrim-fishermen’s stations, Your spillet disentangling and trailing off Into the ...”

“... lowered –I suppose with everything else going onit can pretend it’s not happening. Deception,self-deception, advance by degrees,my dead friend reminds me, and who hasn’tbrought themselves to harm becausethey thought they had to? The dead can be kinderthan the living, if you are not related to them.The anger I would give Orionis what has been given ...”

“... which she had read before she was nine. She also read Jack London’s Martin Eden, a book about a self-taught writer which she later suspected had given her inspiration for her future life. A schoolteacher called Mr Starkie, recognising an unusual capacity in the girl, lent her The Sorrows of Young Werther. She started keeping a diary when she was 12. She ...”

“... women, felt driven to sketch his extraordinary personality. Koestler himself wrote several mordant self-analyses. Scammell from time to time interjects his own ideas on what – his neglectful mother, his inner conflict over his Jewishness in anti-semitic Central Europe – made Koestler so pugnacious, so insufferably competitive, so tyrannical and ruthless ...”

“... Geller had given him a mind-expanding reading list of what we would now recognise as New Age self-help books. Elvis had read them all, performed all the meditations, but didn’t feel the light, not in mind, body or soul. The fire refused to descend; his spiritual air remained a vacuum. Now, on the plush customised tour bus, Geller was thrown by how ...”

“... socialist country, furthering reform, advancing the rule of socialist law and strengthening party self-governance. There are the ‘Four Self-Confidences’: self-confidence in the path of socialism with Chinese characteristics, self-confidence in the ...”

“... we draw the line between dress and costume, between life and art? Edith Sitwell was made to feel self-conscious about her appearance as a child. As an adult she made sure that everyone else would be conscious of it too; this was dress as the performance of personality. My thoughts about women and their clothes, how they wear them and also how they write ...”

“... he was pre-eminent among British psychoanalysts.I don’t think that living through an artificial self, which is what had got me into such an awful mess, is all that uncommon. The condition is difficult to recognise because it is concealed from the world, and from the subject, with ruthless ingenuity. It does not feature in the standard catalogue of neurotic ...”

“... her father and Tancredi, she has neither the intelligence nor the extraordinary, almost abstract self-esteem that the old Leopard has. Lampedusa treats her harshly. Her fondest possession is her father’s dog, stuffed after its death, and the novel ends with her sudden discovery of the ‘inner emptiness’ that the dogskin symbolises: As the carcass was ...”

“... way beyond expectations. When this happens, the player or team seems to acquire an aura of self-assurance that transmits itself to supporters, fuelling a strong conviction that things are going to turn out for the best. This sense of conviction then reinforces the confidence of the players in their own abilities, appearing to create for a while a ...”

“... hoarding flies, reducing his handsome accommodations to a warehouse, caring only to measure his self-contentment by the quantity of his acquisitions, was surely crazy. To remain indifferent to the interests or opinions of others, except when to consult them might mean an increase to his store, the encroaching measure of his own greatness: to live thus was ...”

“... Autobiography of Alice B. as a crucial document in the history of Modernist fashioning and self-fashioning – the story of Axel’s tower or Babel’s, told in the first person. It should also make us think yet again about the legacy of cultural Modernism – and about its relationship to the larger fate of Europe in mid-century. The Man from ...”

“... precocity here takes a cultural form that was central to Spender’s own habitual confidence or self-importance. And the second is that, as a writer, Spender was, as he sometimes acknowledged, a constant autobiographer. In World within World, his first formal autobiography, published when he was only 42, he contrasted himself with those of his poetical ...”

“... to the house looking for something. All I wanted to see, though, were some sketches towards a self-portrait that John Butler Yeats had made in New York towards the end of his life. After lunch, Michael Yeats motioned me to follow him into the hallway. He opened a long drawer in an old chest and began to rummage until he found, wrapped in tissue ...”

“... of the audience, how high a place does he fall from? A further ambiguity comes in with the hint of self-mockery that was inevitable with Welles in the lead. Every detail of the portrait suggested a curious intuition: this hero who loves himself and betrays others never entirely fools himself. He exists to draw people in, to make them enjoy no world but ...”