“... his friends better than the reader does. The vicissitudes of loserdom are described with wit and self-awareness. ‘I admit it tho, I’m getting too distracted now. Jesus. It’s not like a walkthrough anymore – more like a forum for some guy with Attention Deficit Disorder.’ The occasional descents into self-pity are ...”

“... matinee idol of William Wilberforce. All these events took place in an atmosphere suffused with self-congratulation. The crusade against the trade and the government’s eventual response offers a usable past for a society increasingly aware of its multiracial character: a chapter of history of which all Britons can be proud. As Christopher Brown’s ...”

“... to the ailing postbox and … The tuna-based salad, which renders the speaker insane, is pure self-indulgence, an excess which renders the author mildly insane too. There’s a Gogolian needlessness about it: reasonably funny in itself, but as a description of the writer’s own cackling momentum, completely winning. Like Dudley Moore, Barker is a ...”

“... 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 ...”