“... sniffed the air; each, gingerly, made resolutions.’ The penetrating particularity with which self-recognition in Helen and Edward is traced goes some way towards redeeming what would otherwise be a dispiriting tale. Our lives are not what they might have been, but they are not worthless either. We are asked to respect the integrity that might lie behind ...”

“... Some of our received opinions about the Victorians’ mortuary excesses owe as much to their own self-criticism as to their actual practice: contemporary reformers were quick to denounce the expensive funerals popular at the beginning of the period, for example, just as they later campaigned against the ‘ghoul-like ghastliness’ of extravagant ...”

“... to kill by persuading her to commit suicide. His hatred of Christians grew, as did his disturbing self-belief. In 1940, he tried to join the resistance but was turned down. It was more radical, he said, to walk down the street ‘taking a piss with your cock out, with no shame, as I have done’ than it was to follow orders.Ion Antonescu, who took control of ...”

“... isn’t nearly as strong as PR from Brussels would have us believe.Even if liberals’ newfound self-confidence is misplaced, it might shift the parameters of realpolitik. For years, pundits and politicians have been fixated on a wave – or as Nigel Farage once put it, a ‘tsunami’ – of populism. But there was nothing inevitable about this. While ...”

“... rejects James’s own explanation of his career. This was false in several respects, and certainly self-serving, but there was some truth in it. James denied being a criminal (which he certainly was), and argued that he could not surrender and prove his innocence because Radical Republicans, his wartime enemies, would lynch him. The wave of robberies and ...”

“... 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 ...”