“... stick and run it through the corridor of wilderness. It fills a bit with water the first time. Is self-erased. The second time it does not fill. It leaves a mark where my stick ran. I make another (cursive) mark. How easily it bends to cursive, snakes towards thought. Looking back I see the birds eating the bird. The other way my gaze can barely reach ...”

“... and civilians by turns contemptuous and reluctantly admiring, his motives a painful mixture of self-interest and dutiful rigour, Prior is Barker’s most compelling creation. He is a borderline figure whose brooding, antagonistic sessions with Rivers reveal a mind so at odds with itself that at times his dissociation leads to episodes in which he doesn’t ...”

“... relationship. Both end with an ambiguous moment of transformation and a kind of dissolution of self, a breaking of bonds. Messud tells the ‘simple tale’ of Maria Poniatowski, a Ukrainian by birth, whose life in Canada begins only after a series of displacements, incarcerations and escapes. Her native village is first ‘restructured’ as a collective ...”

“... most memorable Londoners we encounter is a melancholic and affected writer called Stokes – the self-proclaimed ‘lion of literary London’. He was lying on the ottoman, swathed as profoundly as a pasha . . . His glittering pointed slippers, curling at the toes like those of some evil genius of the pantomime, were as villainous as a moustache. On his ...”

“... to my name.’ Selfhood is at the mercy of the narrative twist: the kicker is that the twisted self persists, to savour the insight and wonder what to do about it. Alban McGill, the central character in The Steep Approach to Garbadale, is another such puzzle to himself, though he has given up trying to solve it. He has turned his back on his family, the ...”

“... admitted envy of his ease at performing in these sleep experiments; on performance as such; on self-hypnosis as such; and on Surrealism’s initiatory moves. Of course, we have no way of knowing if Conley is right, whatever our initial suspicions may have been. But would it not be an act of supergenius quality to be able to assume this state when that ...”

“... the half-strategic trace of a working-class accent. Though he wouldn’t say so, it reinforces his self-respect to feel that, Prosecco notwithstanding, he remains a Dubliner ‘coarse as cabbage’. The discomfort makes sense too. It must be easier to enjoy money if you’ve made it yourself. One literary pitfall The Lemur does not altogether avoid is that of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... every year – they remain ‘British’, for Rees-Mogg, because of their superior wealth and self-sufficiency. ‘It is the Florida effect,’ he said in a House of Commons speech. ‘People want to go to southern European countries, but they take their wealth with them, which would be welcomed even if we were not members of the EU because poor countries ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... whatever reason, did so knowing they would pay the price ... As often as not, their ostracism was self-imposed; they were their own worst critics. In other words, Victorian England was a society in which – as in Rousseau’s Le Contrat Social – deviants willed their own punishment because they believed that the very existence of society was predicated ...”

“... perverse historical imagination. For all his attachment to documentary research, he took a self-conscious pride in his historian’s ‘green fingers’ – in the fact that he often guessed the truth of what had happened in a particular historical setting long before the archives laid it bare. ‘How do I manage as a historian?’ he wrote to his ...”

“... most of it, a broken string. These extras undermine or spook what is otherwise a portrait of two self-satisfied young men in their prime, which had been commissioned and presumably in outline designed by one of them (Dinteville, on the left), and remained in his family for the next 150 years.North’s interpretation of The Ambassadors starts from the implied ...”