“... joints All of them flush as given! ‘The Stopping Train’ is a haunted meditation on the self as poet, a memorable feat in wry self-satire: the train jolting the poet through life bears a much more generalised and abstract significance than Larkin’s Saturday carriage, which keeps its ‘slow and stopping ...”

“... investigation that his nickname in his native village was the Prince. From this, by a wondrous self-propagation of rumours, arises the idea that Chonkin is a scion of the old nobility in disguise, centre of a vast conspiratorial web, plotting to betray Russia to the Germans and bring back the Czars. But this is the merest scaffolding, on which is hung a ...”

“... images multiply, with Newsome, the reviewer and the reader locked together in observation, and the self-gratification of the diarist continues posthumously. The obsessive voyeur is now, in turn, the object of the voyeuristic reader, though the diarist continues to set the rules and limits of the game. He can choose, if he so wishes, to stop at the brink of ...”

“... the foundation of Rome; a divinely inspired song in the mould of the Iliad and Odyssey that is self-consciously, densely literate; a paean to empire and a lament for empire’s victims. Said to have been commissioned by the emperor Augustus (although it’s debatable quite what that ‘commission’ entailed), the poem was written in the aftermath of a ...”

“... meaning of the title of the book hints, that was not the whole story. Lady Granville’s ‘second self’ was her beloved sister Georgiana, to whom most of these letters were addressed, but there was also a second self within her own personality. The emotional realities and predicaments behind this glittering surface called ...”

“... new. The ‘redemptive promises of language’ trap Bercovitch’s United States in repetitive self-absorption; Lincoln at Gettysburg, in Wills’s subtitle, analyses ‘the words that remade America’. Bercovitch teaches literature at Harvard; Wills, whose book has won the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as a Pulitzer Prize, crosses over ...”

“... Denis Donoghue begins, a little self-indulgently, by reprinting six short BBC talks on ‘Words’. The excuse is that such radio talks offer a simple if incomplete model for Donoghue’s conception of literary discourse: as an address to an invisible audience, or dialogue for ever aborted by the absence of a second party ...”

“... of a man I was trying hard to fill in’. She is, in some ways, just as vestigial: reserved, self-effacing, still living with her mother in the childhood home she has not quite outgrown. In a book where names and their absence carry such freight, Helen’s and Isaac’s are instructive. That there might be something more to Helen is hinted at in her ...”

“... in business. They talk of ‘all-abhorred war’, but they love it. Henry IV offers masculinity as self-combustion. In Hotspur’s words: ‘The mailed Mars shall on his altar sit/Up to the ears in blood. I am on fire.’ And Harriet Walter’s king – legs splayed as if on a bar stool rather than a throne – conveyed an authority which the whole world knows ...”

“... problem was that he was Swiss, and straining to find an identity, but to the average American, self-invention seems to come as second nature, and is no reason for shame or misgivings. In another recent example of that pseudo-autobiographical mode in which Americans excel, The Tao of Muhammad Ali (1997), Davis Miller recalled a conversation with ...”

“... his emotional state you feel weighing on you. As a result, all his pictures can be interpreted as self-portraits. Munch by Himself at the Royal Academy (until 11 December) includes pictures which do not show his face, but are entirely relevant to the theme of the exhibition. In the self-portraits which are just that ...”

“... childhood lanterns skate in the distance where what we take is what we are given. Some call it self-reliance. Ça va? To understand our portion, our bright portion. This is winter and this the winter portion of self-reliance and last century thoughts in ...”

“... pug physiognomy and Ottoman wardrobe created a comic sensation – abetted by a succession of self-portraits in this guise. Court doors opened readily to welcome the novelty act, and the clients didn’t blink at Liotard’s equally outlandish prices. ‘Self-fashioning’, the cultural historians demurely term ...”

“... the question. They assume, surely correctly, that it is a genuine puzzle. There is nothing either self-explanatory or standard about the survival of a united kingdom based on England, from Early Modern times until practically the end of the second millennium. John Robertson’s collection of academic studies examines the origins of the Union’s most ...”

“... of the early star, with all his sudden and surprising brilliance, and the ruminative, bookish, self-deprecating urbanity of the older man. By his own criteria, this made Auden a ‘major poet’, that is, one who ‘writes differently in youth, in middle age and when old’. The young poet started poems better than anyone since Donne, but how did the poet ...”