“... within the PCF as well. His revolutionary fervour was exemplary but his style was undeniably self-advertising and his ambition was clear. It was noted, too, that when, in between jail sentences, he got married (to a PCF militante), the ceremony – amazingly for a PCF leader – took place in church. He moved his now-widowed mother into the new marital ...”

“... landings, and Monty had already been scathing about what he had heard of their performance. His self-confidence, like that of his army, was now at its zenith. He, and they, alone knew how to fight and win: that was the Monty message, and he took pleasure in the exclusive arrogance with which he had infected his own command. It was not wholly justified. The ...”

“... and whose own vitality, unfortunately, has so rarely been explained or defended by philosophic self-reflection that it can easily seem to go by default. For all its abundance, however, American literary theorising can also strike the sceptical outsider as remarkably provincial – ‘devoured’, to use Arnold’s phrase, by crochets and fancies as if ...”

“... lover – ‘every man’s love affair with America’ – and Ernest Hemingway his idea of a self-like literary champ, it might also be said that his astronauts, his boxers, his single-minded karmie killers, his existential heroes, Greenwich Village idiots, his political ogres and saints, his high-minded Trillings, turncoat Podhoretzes, his ...”

“... posturing, and advance by means of evolving figurative patterns rather than by any rigorous self-questioning. In idealising the pragmatist individual, for example, William likes to evoke the kinetic energy of the body, with words like ‘turn’ or ‘set at work’ or ‘actions’, that sound like casual evocations of his outdoorsy athleticism. On ...”

“... rich tangle of ideas about women and independence, with an undefined femininity seen as closer to self-sufficiency than a more assertive style of occupying space. Christine’s idea of camouflaged autonomy seems to be something of a shared ideal, or shared illusion. Lydia is less intellectual and academic: she did bar work while Christine worked towards a PhD ...”

“... Herbert’s poems vividly describe the inner weather of Christian devotion. It’s all there: self-abasement before God; horror at his absence; meditation on the boundless enormity of sin; meditation on the boundless generosity of Christ’s sacrifice; outpourings of gratitude and love; self-excoriation for insufficient ...”

“... Some sixty years on, and the terms in which he construes the drama between the absent self and the dreams or ‘tales of old disguisings’ have hardly changed. The melodrama, of course, remains too, and is present in nearly all of Pound’s most resonant moments: ‘As a lone ant from a broken ant-hill/ from the wreckage of Europe, ego ...”

“... of a UK Top 20 hit, the Who’s ‘Substitute’, a vexed, stuttering anti-manifesto, with its self-accusatory boast: ‘The simple things you see are all complicated!’ You couldn’t find two more different musical cries: Davis’s liquid tone is hurt, steely, recessive, where Townshend’s is upfront, impatient, hectoring. One arrow points in, the ...”

“... might properly alienate readers only slightly attracted to the lure of the Master. But the self-consciousness is here calculated. Isabel is a heroine in triplicate. She has just walked into a novel; she thinks of herself in heroic terms; and a group of gazers – or readers – watchful as a Greek chorus but endowed with greater agency, seems to have ...”

“... Europe’s cathedrals. Bolaño is plainly sympathetic to this frightened old man caught between self-justification and remorse, but gives him his comeuppance all the same: ‘And then the storm of shit begins.’ On the other side – the side of revolution, disorder and failure – are Bolaño’s (anti-)heroes. From the first paragraph of the story ...”

“... a shared future. In a matter of moments Mother has moved from oblique manipulation with a hint of self-pity – ‘Would I ever be allowed to meet her?’, forcing the desperately evasive answer ‘I’m sure she’d love to meet you’ – to winkling out the secret of the ring. Jay’s blunder is highly consequential. Mother is indiscreet, or rather her ...”

“... of anonymous letters. Despite all of this, Mr Justice Avory was not convinced that the slender, self-possessed woman in front of him was capable of writing such a letter. The Brighton Argus reported that he directed the jury to ‘consider whether it was conceivable that she could have written this document’ given that her ‘demeanour in the witness box ...”

“... new book takes its title from a passage in Aurora Leigh where Romney patronises the almost self-taught Aurora for writing ‘lady’s Greek,/Without the accents’. This is just the start of a complaint about women who want to be clever and poetical when they should be supporting men who are trying to improve the world: ‘Work man, work woman, since ...”

“... evidently Morel belongs to the ranks of ‘misanthropes and atheists’. The governor, a self-proclaimed republican humanist, suspects Morel of misanthropy too: ‘That fellow is trying to tell us what he thinks of us, to show his scorn for humanity, and he uses elephants as a means of expression, that’s all.’ Or perhaps elephants are ‘a mere ...”