“... to think that all these hours, when my days are full of vigour and my hands and soul craving for self-expression, I am bound, chained to this fiendish mangling-machine, without . . . hope of deliverance . . . I despair of ever writing excellent poetry. I can’t look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do. My mind is so cramped and dulled ...”

“... responsible for is the selection of his subjects. In this at least, it is reasonable to ask for a self-conscious and prudent balancing of considerations of eligibility and hazard, and a firm sense of how authority itself is to be conceived. Where the relation between our surviving knowledge about the human life in question and the content of the ideas which ...”

“... version completed in the inter-war years. The various psychological dramas that evolve among these self-indulgent courtiers of Japan a thousand years ago can still move the reader. Secondly, strange as it may seem, The Tale of Genji provides a way of understanding an aspect of present-day Japan. The Japanese sense of national identity is intimately linked to ...”

“... he was treated multiple times for alcohol and drug addiction, and he now speaks openly and self-effacingly about his struggles with mental health. These events have shaped O’Sullivan’s life, and he has returned to them in profiles, TV documentaries and two previous memoirs. His first, Ronnie (2003), told the story of his startling rise to ...”

“... identity, anxious and even guilty about his enthusiasms and pleasures, searching for a singular self.’ It can be a dangerous game, but investing in other selves, in less tribal ways of accessing your ‘authenticity’, may be a stylist’s chief prerogative. The heroes of prose fiction are not merely good at doing voices (as Dickens was, on the page and ...”

“... funny.I am not a good weeper when people die.There is no false modesty here, more a persistent self-reckoning. As she also liked to say, ‘there are things that I have accomplished and things I failed to do.’Segal’s accomplishments, over eighty years, have long been acknowledged, even if they remain for the most part under the radar. That her books ...”

“... in turning profits but in growing his business and acquiring ever more novel tech companies. His self-aggrandising ‘mine is bigger than yours’ attitude impressed both Trump and Mohammed bin Salman. Barber recounts a meeting between Son and the soon-to-be US president at which Trump showed Son how to replicate his signature combover. Son and bin Salman ...”

“... of the Middle Ages. Civilisation recovered, but growth in a world of limits was ultimately self-defeating. The prosperity of the 16th century soon gave way to famine, drought, war and plague. It was only after modern technology unlocked the productive capacities of the earth that society was able to escape this cycle of expansion, crisis and ...”

“... to be had conducting visitors on medico-spiritual ‘journeys’ of healing, personal growth and self-actualisation under the influence of ayahuasca, cacti and magic mushrooms.Traditionally, it was the shaman who swallowed or sniffed intoxicating plants as a way of gaining access to the world of the spirits, but the new Western clients are focused on their ...”

“... to point to an imaginative hinterland in a detective’s mind, and there’s an element of wry self-reference here. A character in Cover Her Face makes the point: ‘The cultured cop! I thought they were peculiar to detective novels. Congratulations!’ Dalgliesh is at his most predictable in his supposed eccentricity.James would not have claimed the ...”

“... as (certain) others are. She must, therefore, be brought lower than these others so as to receive self-knowledge. There are many variations on this theme in O’Connor’s work. In general, the pretensions of such characters are harmless, for they haven’t the power of wealth and cannot seriously oppress anyone. The marks of their pride are trivial. The ...”

“... that might be said to constitute an unacknowledged philosophy – there was a reluctance to extend self-consciousness in that direction. Criticism, it was thought, should remain auxiliary. If it intended to raise the question of its universal or principled basis, it might apply to Philosophy, not to Literature, for its academic entrée. It is certainly unusual ...”

“... of existence: after killing the swan in an excess of naturally unreflective, predatorially self-assertive energy (Wahn, in Wagner’s Schopenhauerean sense), Parsifal’s moral growth begins (like Brünnhilde’s) in compassionate identification. In Syberberg’s Act Two, when Parsifal kisses Kundry and identifies with Amfortas’s suffering, the ...”

“... the two things were co-extensive. Like one of those periods in Chinese history when Confucian self-discipline and Taoist impulsiveness nourished each other, Montale’s inner life was both naively fruitful and sophisticatedly self-aware. It makes him great fun to read, as if the smartest man in the world were a friend ...”

“... ships?) picks itself out as a conscious ironic hollowness, and signals a particular kind of verbal self-attention. Beckett is great in his suspicion of and pleasure in the once eloquent, his sentences so often digging up and putting on display the glint of an excommonplace. But few other writers have found a seriousness to go with the pleasure of this register ...”