“... this pamphlet as a typical example of 1840s utopian reformism – a combination of grand ambition, self-interest and petty detail: the thickness of walls in the work-camps, the necessary quantities of animal dung, the projected income from potatoes and vegetables. It is also typical of the future Napoleon III. Like most of his acts and utterances, it manages ...”

“... had taken over from art and religion as the custodian of truth. The World Spirit had come to self-consciousness in his own head, rendering any less rational form of knowledge outmoded. Yet religion has retained its capacity to spark riots and launch civil wars, while art has survived as a refined version of religion for the intelligentsia: most aesthetic ...”

“... in her memoir, Poets in Their Youth.) Delmore Schwartz, Roethke, Jarrell and Berryman were all self-consciously poètes maudits, and they all died before Lowell. So did his pupils Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Dying at 60, Lowell, for all his self-destructive ways, was a survivor. Speaking of life in Boston during one of ...”

“... writer he enormously admired), his shortcomings are readily apparent. Mencken’s jokes are always self-serving: they elevate the humorist and those who think him funny at somebody else’s expense, generally a mass of less intelligent somebodies. When he says, ‘I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only ...”

“... of things without designations, back where there were no proper names, not even a name for the self. Linnaeus’ story reminds us by how thin a thread our language ties us to the familiar world. Heller-Roazen’s archive of the forgotten has the similarly salutary effect of helping us see what was always there, but somehow invisible or, more ...”

“... and who wrote without rage or resentment, expressing her genius ‘whole and entire’. Such self-effacing purity eludes Woolf, who, like the angry Charlotte Brontë writing of herself when she should be writing of her characters, becomes a figure in her own essay, scribbling flames over the face of Professor von X. In the practice of what she calls ...”

“... or deposed in coups or became paranoiac dictators. The significance of independence and self-determination, ‘the two pillars that make possible our modernisation’, have been lost. What remains is the ‘narrative of failed nation-states, the theatres of Afro-pessimism’. One of Diawara’s projects in The Search for Africa is to script a film ...”

“... they’re candid or not. They’re obviously not candid in some respects. They were already self-bowdlerised before Rimington submitted them to her MI5 vetters, who insisted she bowdlerise them some more, all in the interests of ‘national security’. Whether the parts that remain are truthful is impossible for an outsider to say. I do know that many ...”

“... as he has lost the courage of his convictions. It’s clear that he never had the political self-confidence to impose his authority on the neo-Blairites who surround him. Nonetheless, Labour’s problems aren’t all the doing of the leadership. Equally responsible are the external circumstances that are in the process of reshaping the British political ...”

“... after going back to full-time drinking in the wake of his wife’s death in 1954.) But Marlowe is self-conscious about his narratorial duties from the start. He keeps close watch on his similes: ‘I thought that was silly as soon as I thought of it,’ he says in The Big Sleep after likening a woman’s voice to ‘bells in a doll’s house’. On occasion ...”

“... love,’ as the motto of the Russian muzhik, a real man, goes. Immigration is a splitting of the self. But it’s also a premature schism in the most important union. If Shteyngart’s memoir is a love story between him and his parents – and it is – this is where the marriage hits the rocks. The young lovers grow apart. They want other things. They ...”

“... mass of biographies can make Dickens’s life seem as inevitable as a fairy tale, his genius so self-evident that a novelist’s career was certain. But the alternative lives he might have led, as a debtor like his father, or as a clerk or a journalist, jobs he held and discarded, stayed in his thoughts and haunted his novels. William James believed that ...”

“... underwent a dramatic change of character, sounding more like the populist Sun than its former self, as it ventured deep into come-off-it-mate territory. Headlines promised revelations about ‘Tory Country Gents’, ‘Toffs’ and ‘Grandees’. In the Telegraph of old, such people were meant to be its readers; now the paper used Google Earth to zoom in ...”

“... paranoiac [Fliess] fails,’ he wrote to Sándor Ferenczi in 1910. It is on Freud’s eminently self-serving interpretation of his relationship with Fliess that Ernest Jones and Ernst Kris, editor of the censored version of Freud’s letters to Fliess, relied when, at the beginning of the 1950s, they constructed the myth of Freud’s ...”

“... any sugar plantations in the Caribbean, cotton mills in Manchester, parlour-maids, benefactors or self-martyring subservient spouses: times have changed. Writing – particularly the writing of novels – requires the twin privileges of time and money, and if you haven’t got them you are almost certainly doomed to failure, ground down by the exigencies of ...”