“... setting also turns Mislaid into a campus novel. Stillwater College, Zink writes, is ‘as self-contained as an army base. But no basic training. No cleaning, no cooking. The work you had to do consisted of things like ponder Edna St Vincent Millay. If you screwed it up, they didn’t criticise you. They invited you to their offices, offered you ...”

“... and her own for invoking it. In ‘Black Kief and the Intellectual’, the irony is self-lacerating: ‘Ah, miserable at last! Felicity.’ Even her youth is decaying: ‘I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown/My private modern life has gone to waste’ (‘Bedouin of the London Evening’). Her poetry is ecstatic and ...”

“... But I was soon persuaded that the only sensible way to oversee financial markets is statute-backed self-regulation. It can’t be left to civil servants round whom the traders will run effortless rings. And it can’t be left to practitioners, who in an intensely competitive environment will inevitably subordinate the public interest to their own to a greater ...”

“... doing nothing is what I have to do to write. Or: writing is what I have to do to be my melancholy self. And be alone.Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are the best days:I get on with the new novel. Smoke. Drink coffee. Smoke. Write. Stare at ceiling. Smoke. Write. Lie on the sofa. Drink coffee. Write.On Monday a man came to talk to her about depression and the ...”

“... image and interruptions to its surface. ‘Ossip Zadkine’ (1914) A sense of interiority and self-possession is common to all Hamnett’s portraits: they hold the viewer at a distance. Like her still lifes, they are anti-mimetic, creating the impression of a person rather than an exact likeness. Faces are smoothed and abstracted, with features almost ...”

“... are clearly a product of the late 1960s and early 1970s hippy shift from political action to ‘self-actualisation’, often through some kind of psychic or spiritual awakening. In The Lion, this shows itself in the doubled masculine crisis of a father’s midlife reinvention and a son’s journey from adolescence to manhood. Hoban’s work at times flows ...”

“... talk about your work and not your life, if you don’t mind. ‘Bob’s patrician manner was self-created,’ Jonathan Galassi told me, ‘deliberately low-key, warm yet self-protective.’ The thing was to keep moving forward and not look back. Even at Barbara Epstein’s wake, held in her apartment on West 67th ...”

“... we inhabit. The poems anatomise the possibility of love in a time of unprecedented corruption, self-interest, lies and destructiveness on the part of global capitalism and its leaders and followers. Sutherland has been publishing pamphlets and books of poems for some 25 years, known at first to a small but steadily increasing number of readers in the UK ...”

“... struck anew by the many excellent qualities of Ross Raisin’s new book. The school of writerly self-absorption has given us much fine fiction, or semi-fiction, in recent years. But it can create a strong thirst for the opposite tendency: for novels that take you somewhere you haven’t been before, that create an enclosed, distinctive world of their ...”

“... strategies she used to deflate the appearance of pride only made her seem bitter, overwrought and self-contradictory. Constructions of gender in antiquity have long been studied. But the subject is relatively new to Byzantine history and enables a fresh understanding of Anna’s more puzzling strategies. Modesty and seclusion remained central to the feminine ...”

“... pouch filled with red threads.In her telling (Vicuña is a compelling, and at times contradictory, self-mythologiser), she began making art after an epiphany in January 1966. She was seventeen and planning to study architecture. She found a stick on the beach, and planted it in the sand. When it was vertical, ‘I had woven my place in the world.’ She drew a ...”

“... women enlisting in the army or navy, sometimes out of a patriotic desire for excitement and self-assertion, sometimes in the hope of staying close to a husband or lover, sometimes simply because military or naval service offered a better living than was available in most women’s occupations. It might, for one thing, make it easier to get to the East ...”

“... organs of propaganda in Iraq. This view is that the royal family in Kuwait has been corrupt and self-serving, and has shamelessly and cynically stratified society within the Amirate. Such criticism has found some sympathy among those inside Kuwait. As one Palestinian living and working there told me, Kuwait is a place of insiders and outsiders. If you are ...”

“... she casts at least provisional doubt on both the soul and the judgment of her voluble and somewhat self-intoxicated narrator, as he assembles the remains of his disintegrating family for us. He has been in the North and knows his Thoreau, so he starts by dismantling one ruined house in order to fortify and then inhabit another. And from this fastness he ...”

“... woman. The contrast with Cleopatra is clear. The story of her death is a story of self-destruction. There is no male hero-murderer. Her snakes in the end turn against her, their host, to show that ultimately the power of woman will destroy itself. This story has, of course, elements of pathos. There is a tragedy, almost a heroism, in the ...”