“... 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 ...”

“... that of his relationships with his teachers and friends, which appear to have been consistently self-seeking, vindictive, and occasionally perfidious. This is especially true of his dealings with the aged Edmund Husserl, to whom he owed his first university appointment at Freiburg, his first Chair (at Marburg), and whom he succeeded as Professor of ...”

“... does not seem to be a passing fad. The scandal-maker of the 1930s became, by a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, part of the saving remnant on which the future of reading would depend. The photo on the cover of Denys Thompson’s The Leavises shows him in a jacket impermeable to the insults of time and with the open shirt of a Labour leader. He ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... dining room table.’ The Moomins would add you, however strange and ungainly your inner or outer self, to their table, without question.I would never wish to do without the power of the orphan story, however. It has a burning warmth and clarity to it. It matters to us all, because we all become orphans in the end. The orphan story has traditionally offered a ...”

“... advantage. The elder by five years, Le Brun was more naturally talented, better trained and more self-assured in dealing with the peculiar difficulties that beset women artists. On both sides of the Channel, the highest genre – history painting – was thought to be beyond them and as they were not allowed to study the nude, except from casts, classical ...”

“... and that in turning to her, he was showing the dominance of his literary over his political self. Even if one leaves aside the question of whether ‘polities’ versus ‘literature’ is not a false disjunction – he said that above all else he wanted to make ‘political writing into an art’ – as well as the question of whether there might not ...”

“... 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 ...”