“... that has more successfully brought historical and literary insights together. If Donaldson’s self-effacing prose (so un-Jonsonian a quality) and the quietness of his reasoning may occasionally obscure the novelty and penetration of his narrative, there is no missing the surges of power when he tackles hitherto unyielding biographical mysteries. The ...”

“... period, a lawless Wild West of unmeaning and misunderstanding that was at some point tamed by the self-discipline and integrity of politicians and the formation of the national media which until recently we held in such high regard. This second assumption is equally misguided. Politicians have always lied, or half-lied, and the media has always leaned one way ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and directors, and will very likely be heard in due course at Branagh’s own, gives this ending a self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness which further align it with the habits of the last plays. It is a little inconvenient for accounts of Shakespeare’s last period that insist on explaining it in terms of a return to ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... It was not a ‘harbinger of the downfall of Communist power’, in his view, but a carefully self-limiting revolt which accepted that Communism could not be overthrown. ‘The developments in Poland were a stirring prologue to the narrative of Communism’s collapse, but they remained a sideshow. The real story was elsewhere.’ In other words, not in ...”

“... with very pale tights’ look like ‘pigs’ trotters’, apparently, but ‘clothes are about self-expression’ so ‘feel free to ignore all of the above.’ The most straightforwardly entertaining parts of the book are those in which Picardie uses her press credentials to enter the dim, gothic world of European high fashion, with its ...”

“... Spark performs a perpetual disowning and reowning of creaturely and particularly writerly self-loss: to write or to speak is to borrow a power capable of being turned unnervingly against one, and autobiographical connection yields not security of possession but a sense of the uncanny. Spark’s fiction seems not merely to recall her life but – just ...”

“... it seems likely that Orwell needed some symbolic manumission in order to emancipate his writing self. One notes, in support of this, the prominence in the novels of heroes like Gordon Comstock who break with their stultifying families. And it is interesting, in the light of the works reviewed here, that Patricia Highsmith also seems to have been one of ...”

“... emotions.’ Hand-reading was, Bashford says, ‘part of the history of a modern search for a self’, its language changing with historical changes in conceptions of the self’s structure and dynamics.In the 19th and 20th centuries, while hand-reading might tell what you were really like as an individual, Darwin’s ...”

“... early religious feeling made him ‘rest in the thought of two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’. Spark’s heroine loves the passage, but also feels ‘a revulsion against an awful madness I then discerned in it’. That awful madness within the love of God, and the correspondingly awful madness that potentially ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be achieved by examining men’s attitudes to God, nature, one another, and in particular their self-images as these are embodied in social institutions, especially in forms of language and of religious and artistic self-expression, connected in his mind with class conflict and social tension: these institutions provided ...”

“... the innate political wisdom of the Polish people, requires a suspension of disbelief. The ‘self-limiting revolution’ of the American subtitle looks like a marker set down for a future which will not now take place. There is, in fact, a contradiction between his highly realistic narrative and his idealism, which amounts almost to an emotional ...”