“... was that of Gladstonianism, which long outlived Gladstone. This was the era of moral improvement, self-help and laissez-faire; or at any rate of restriction of the strictly economic role of state activity to the grounds sanctioned by classical (or neo-classical) economic precepts. The state had no responsibility for the working of the system as a whole. At ...”

“... Guardian, praising the ‘sadness and honesty’ of Inglis’s book. ‘He ruefully chronicles the self-delusions, and above all the foolish self-righteousness of socialist intellectuals in Britain.’ A charitable interpretation of this book is that Inglis is a fantasist, and that just as he could palm himself off to his ...”

“... a friend on Denmark.’ I felt that she was speaking to my better, less disabled and still fresh self, hoping perhaps to lift me out of the sodden delinquency of my life, already burdened with worries and anxieties that I was now sure were to threaten my future. Reading Hamlet as an affirmation of my status in her eyes, not as someone devalued, as in mine I ...”

“... nicotine junkies. It means that the site is protected against whatever lurks outside. It becomes a self-contained module, art-friendly, Web-friendly, vegetarian and open to offers from film companies. The decontaminated civic space (rescued from blight) is the contrary of the Paris described in Apollinaire’s ‘Zone’, which celebrated a cartography of ...”

“... later shaken and depleted, but optimistic in the belief that depression in most cases was ‘self-limiting’ and eventually runs its course ‘until the victim comes out the other end of his nightmare more or less intact. In the meantime, however, it’s Auschwitz time in the heart of the soul – a form of madness I wouldn’t wish upon a literary ...”

“... it is a simple escape from personality, and, as a model for poetry, much closer to a fetishistic self-fashioning than it is to ascetic self-abnegation.’ He writes that a number of poems in Gunn’s second volume, The Sense of Movement (1957), are no longer poems of the wounded or divided ...”

“... in my own eyes; a sad sack enclosing a disease process, no longer an object of respect, or self-respect. He spoke to me kindly, and cut the dose by a third. Very few doctors understand this: that, somehow, you have to live till you’re cured. I went home, to the dark, enclosed rooms of our apartment. I cut my dose by a third. Presently I sat down and ...”

“... intuitions, omens, dreams, haunted places, &c, &c.’ In and out of poems, Hardy apprehends the self as one of those spectres:For my part, if there is any way of getting a melancholy satisfaction out of life it lies in dying, so to speak, before one is out of the flesh; by which I mean putting on the manners of ghosts, wandering in their haunts and taking ...”

“... talking to me like that gave me a sense of importance. Of significance. Of inner growth. Self-awareness was born. I began to take myself seriously.’ The turbot, who speaks the spare dialect of the Baltic coast, ‘a language of few words, a wretched stammering that [names] only the strictly necessary’, begins his passage through Grass’s book as ...”

“... more and more the truth of Vietnam is in the nearby countries ... I don’t have the wonderful self-confidence of Isaiah – ‘I’m a terrific domino man’ – but I share the feeling that’s where we have done best.There were fainthearts, of course, as there always are when great enterprises of the will are afoot. As an ever-increasing number even of ...”

“... without his usual manner, bewildered and defensive. Even while she was still alive he had written self-exculpatingly: ‘I expressed myself clumsily to Miss Woolson in appearing to intimate that I was coming there to “live”.’ It was necessary for James as a writer to ‘live’ in inverted commas, but terrible accidents occurred. Reading through this ...”

“... at some point he slipped from seeming younger to seeming older than everyone around him. He was a self-taught modernist with an allegiance to medieval romance and Celtic art, a Londoner who was out of place in London, a Welshman who didn’t speak Welsh. He was an artist who constructed images out of words – in his painted inscriptions – and whose poems ...”

“... of the gods, daring to ask the one forbidden question, the renunciation of love for power, genital self-mutilation as the price of magic: Wagner’s work is everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits reached and exceeded. ‘Wagnerian’ has passed into our language as a byword for the exorbitant, the over-scaled and the ...”

“... a solution to the problem of having a shameful identity that lurked in the deepest recesses of the self. This idea of knowing two things at the same time has been essential to gay people in other ways. Gay people have known that our sexuality was actually, despite what we read or were told, quite normal, quite natural; it was only the world that thought ...”

“... puts it, and there were three more children. The True Confession, by turns grand and grandiose, self-accusing and self-regarding, serious and punning, was essentially a poetical goodbye letter. What can one say of Elizabeth Smart more than that she loved a poet who by the conventional standards they both rejected treated ...”