“... master, two conditions must in turn be satisfied. You must first of all succeed in mastering your self. By this Milton means that you must be able to control your passions and act in accordance with the dictates of reason at all times. If you instead allow yourself, as he puts it at the beginning of The Tenure, to be governed by blind affections, then your ...”

“... been suicidal (he claimed his last jump would be without a harness, or was that just an artist’s self-promotion?) and he dies in the end of unrelated natural causes (a heart condition) somewhere near Saginaw, Michigan, deep in the heart of the country. (Saginaw: the place Paul Simon’s protagonist hitchhikes from when he goes ‘to look for ...”

“... has edited herself into the story: she is looking out at her father and infant brother, her unborn self, the pregnant mother. A corporeal ghost, back from the future, eavesdropping on that captured scene, the group on the grass. While some unknown photographer presses the shutter. What is intriguing is how she uses her technique, the layering, the rubbing ...”

“... of some collective ‘illusion’ that would provide its people with a sense of purpose and mutual self-esteem. To give his considerations on Rome a focus, Pick follows the story of the man who, in the decades following Leopardi’s death, sought to promote an ‘illusion’ of the sort the poet had prescribed: in speech after speech from the balconies of ...”

“... of the portrayal of Kiarostami as an auteur. What he seems to admire most about him is his self-effacement. He praises the ‘ingenuous eye of his camera’ for stripping away cultural constructions and quietly enabling us to see the ‘nakedness of reality’. Kiarostami ‘became the Iranian post-Revolutionary film-maker par excellence’, Dabashi ...”

“... of work on the Concerto for two pianos. On the way he takes in Stravinsky’s astonishing self-creation with The Firebird ballet, written when he was 27 (there had been little indication of his genius before that), the revolutionary achievement of the subsequent Diaghilev ballets, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring; the vivid transformation of Russian ...”

“... American corporations who profit from state-funded violence and who advertise their greed as a self-righteous war on evil. It is nice to see that, after a century and a half of misinformed adulation, Vidocq is finally getting his just deserts. Eugène-François Vidocq was born in 1775 in Arras, where his parents ran a bakery. After bullying and pilfering ...”

“... the extent of his appetite, the audacity of his opportunism and the oceanic immensity of his self-regard prompt awe – as well as sentences like these, cumulative and insistent, as his own so often were. The title of David Bellos’s book on Les Misérables – The Novel of the Century – immediately tells us we’re in the territory; Hugo is greater ...”

“... been if he hadn’t had the benefits of an education. When Harrison mentions his poetry, his rival self, a graffiti artist, is scornful: ‘Who needs/yer fucking poufy words. Ah write mi own./Ah’ve got mi work on show all over Leeds.’ And when Harrison speculates that such graffiti are a cri de coeur,the response is contemptuous:So what’s a ...”

“... Leiris (b. 1901) went on to become an ethnographer, though he is much more famous for his lifelong self-investigation in a series of startling autobiographical works. L’Age d’homme, which began to take shape in 1930, was the first. By then, he had finished his military service, abandoned his studies in chemistry and was moving in a world that suited his ...”

“... in the Nivernais’ (1849) Bonheur was a new kind of celebrity. ‘Life had taught her self-reliance,’ Hewitt writes, ‘and accepting, even flaunting, her own idiosyncrasies had become a survival mechanism.’ It had also become part of her brand. When Édouard Dubufe painted her portrait for the Salon of 1857, she insisted on replacing the ...”

“... already overcrowded and grimacing back row,’ but he is a survivor, possessed of a ‘wheedling, self-deprecatory manner’, which has ‘procured him a wide variety of jobs, extracted him from equally extensive misadventures’. ‘His movements,’ we learn, when the narrator, after many years of not seeing him, catches sight of Bagshaw on a railway ...”

“... affection; she loved them with the open-hearted arrogance typical of many older, brighter, self-absorbed siblings, to whom it never occurs that their own affections might not be returned in kind.In 1934, Maeve’s father was appointed the Republic of lreland’s envoy to the United States, and the family moved to Washington, DC; four years later, he ...”

“... drove his journalism, that ‘decision-makers were weaker, more incompetent, more divided, more self-destructively corrupt than they liked people to understand and hence more vulnerable to journalistic attack and exposure.’It’s hard now to imagine just how pompous, stuffy, callous and arrogant Britain’s rulers were in the 1930s – and that includes ...”

“... This was one of the Cold War axioms encountered in the US in the 1970s that struck me as self-evidently wrong. Having grown up with an outspoken left-wing father who trod on toes in Cold War Australia (where we had our own HUAC equivalents in the form of Royal Commissions on espionage and communism), it seemed odd to me that Americans had so quickly ...”