“... photocopied typescripts of the Sigma project, launched in 1964 by novelist, junkie and self-described ‘cosmonaut of inner space’, the late Alexander Trocchi. Sigma was meant to revolutionise the planet: to bring together cultural dissidents from all over the West, until their various schemes and finally their single voice, seductive and ...”

“... strange miracles with perception and with language, so that in verses pared almost to the bone the self and objects in view become at the same time distinct and interfused: There is a blessing in the air, Which seems a sense of joy to yield To the bare trees, and mountains bare, And grass in the green field. But a mild March morning, like the one the ...”

“... at its best usually involving some element of performance, confession, manifesto, or other form of self-declaration. The best correspondents have both a hunger for experience and the itch to communicate it: one remembers Byron, attending in Rome the beheading of three robbers, sitting near the front with his opera-glass trained on the spectacle, and insisting ...”

“... In The Orators W.H. Auden classified bird buffs as ‘excessive lovers of self’: they illustrate the psychological type who is ‘unable to taste pleasure unless through the rare coincidence of naturally diverse events, or the performance of a long and intricate ritual’. Redmond O’Hanlon sees his own career as a bird-watcher originating along similar lines to this but rather more romantically ...”

“... good place to observe all these moves. The title is terrible, of course, a bit of pastel-minded self-plagiarism, but Stendhal would probably have changed that. He considered another, worse possibility: The Rose of the North. ‘A flat and pretentious title,’ he ruefully commented, ‘which seemed fine to me yesterday.’ The work was written in ...”

“... and contrary to the spirit of Dylan’s songs with their continued insistence on the virtues of self-reliance – ‘Trust yourself,’ ‘You don’t need a weatherman/ To know which way the wind blows ...’ Williams is absolutely, and even touchingly, sincere in his homage, but his heart-felt devotion only rarely throws up worthwhile insights into his ...”

“... which reminds them of this dark side of themselves. The usual reaction is a flood of popular self-righteous condemnation but a willingness to, with friends and acquaintances, talk over and over again the appropriate bits of the case. The interest so upsetting to Nilsen – the dog-loving, Guardian-reading Job Centre bureaucrat and former policeman who ...”

“... some people as a great journalist. But if he is, that is a tribute to the power of longevity and self-created myth. To be read for the studied perversity of one’s opinions, and the calculated outrage provoked by one’s means of expressing them, supplies celebrity of a sort. As a contribution to public knowledge and even public entertainment, though, it ...”

“... attitude towards the profession on the first is at odds with his participation in the Bar’s self-satisfaction over the second. The Bar’s howl of rage at the end of the Eighties at the plans of a government for whom most of its members had voted to introduce more competition into the provision of legal services, and to cut out restrictive ...”

“... Proust despised for having supposed in his philistinism that the writer’s social and creative self were one and the same, that the person you dined and talked with in the cafés or salons was the same person who went home and wrote the Fleurs du mal or Madame Bovary. Proust insisted on two selves for the true writer, a surface ...”

“... all internal opposition: high-tech Japan is leading the world into ‘a fantastic dystopia of self-emptied, idea-vacated, and purpose-lost production, consumption, and daydreaming’. Miyoshi has a distinct advantage when it comes to making such sweeping statements because, as a former Japanese subject, now a naturalised US citizen, he really is both an ...”

“... concerns the role of the Wets. This chapter, ‘Why the Moderates Lost’, involves some painful self-examination. Lord Gilmour, who admits to ‘grave dereliction of duty’, asks himself whether the Wets could have done anything else. He concludes that he himself should have resigned at the time of the 1981 Budget, and not awaited dismissal at the end of ...”

“... his detractors were. Epstein found the attitudes of critics understandable: they were a dishonest, self-serving lot. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘the almost insane hatred of the average man and woman that is baffling.’ What is it about Epstein and England that explains the rows and tetchy relationships, the ‘insane hatred’ – and, more pertinently the ...”

“... in a cinema, was, significantly, Coriolanus. Mrs Melville, wife of the vicar of Stratford, a self-confessed Fascist and anti-semite who vigorously opposed the inclusion of the Soviet flag at the Birthday ceremonies, was a governor of the Shakespeare Theatre and must therefore have had a hand in the choice of Birthday play, the hero of which shared her ...”

“... What of the ‘profound and sombre silence’ (according to one eye-witness) in which the self-appointed executioners of hundreds of ‘traitors’ (mostly priests) went about their grisly business in the Abbaye in September 1792? How, as Lynn Hunt asks, should we read the difference between the solemn and orderly trial of Louis XVI and the wild ...”