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“... at getting people to imagine what he might have been if he hadn’t been who he was – it is too self-regarding to be merely disappointed or contemptuous. So when Lycett refers to Thomas as ‘a snivelling wreck’ as he begins to collapse on one of the reckless reading tours of America which eventually killed him, and then qualifies this with ‘– a not ...”

“... them. Misunderstandings between people are funny because they suggest the great vanity of the self. In that Scottish anecdote, two sealed egoisms talk past each other: the master, thinking of himself, asks the servant if he has been tarnishing his reputation; the servant, also thinking of himself, replies with information about his own mental ...”

“... a gift,      The poet exhibits here How to be conscious in every direction But that of the self, where deception starts. Not that self-consciousness is necessarily at fault, according to the poem, but it has to be kept in balance, ‘under laws/Of disciplined sensibility’, as in 17th-century Wit. When these ...”

“... brilliant, somewhat bonkers idea that Earth can be understood as a living organism – a complex, self-regulating system which acts to ensure its own survival. This idea has new resonance in a time of climate crisis, and in Novacene, James Lovelock, the man who proposed the Gaia hypothesis (and who turned a hundred in 2019), has set down some thoughts about ...”

“... insufficiently recognised by the king’s settlement. Disaffected, they drifted into cynicism and self-interest. There were things owing, promised, missing. Liars and opportunists had flourished during the years of upheaval, like the old royalist colonel in the satire ‘Timon’ (probably by Rochester), who brags about his supposed Interregnum ...”

“... simple distinctions between his early and later works: ‘If the late/Writings are about grace and self-loathing/Tick the box’; ‘The late work I find strange/To live with, like derange-/ment’; ‘Not again those marvellous early poems/Lately acknowledged’. He is right to be irritated, since there are at least three loose groups of extremely various ...”

“... heroes, who are often also the narrators of the novels in which they appear, tend to be highly self-conscious art historians, or scientists or academics with high aesthetic ideals and dodgy personal histories, like Victor Maskell, the Anthony Blunt-ish hero of The Untouchable, or the murderer Freddie Montgomery in The Book of Evidence, or the unnamed ...”

“... sick man yearning for health. Indeed, the sentimental poet idealises nature much as we (including, self-confessedly, Schiller) sentimentalise the Greeks themselves. The problem for modern literature of this loss of innocence is that, in contrast with the ancient simple poet, we never see ‘the object itself’: instead, the modern poet is always reflecting on ...”

“... Smollett, always a Tory critic of commercial ‘progress’, was sick and disenchanted, living in self-exile in Italy. It is always supposed that Bramble’s disgust was also Smollett’s. Yet the form of the fiction says: ‘take your choice.’ Either, here is every absurdity of appetite posing as elegance; or, here are the delights and excitements of a ...”

“... wisdom about the nation and its future. It is an attempt, in effect, to repeal the scepticism and self-doubt of the Sixties and Seventies and to return to an earlier, more innocent vision of America: a vision more characteristic of the imperial years of the immediate post-war era than of the more complicated era that followed. ‘We are the pioneers of the ...”

“... her natural and unredeemed state and the peculiar idol she must become if she espouses the work of self-admonition and self-regulation, and therefore of disguise, constraint, impassivity. She must do this because, naked and unashamed, she once performed the original act or sin of flouting God’s will and of bringing man to ...”

“... which for so many male American writers is the most crucial one: the search for the unfettered self.’ The ‘unfettered self’, or rather its expression in paint, was exactly what the makers of Abstract Expressionism in the Forties and Fifties pursued. Robert Motherwell was one of them, and his collected writings ...”

“... and its commitment to a ‘bottom-up’ practice centred on personal reflection, narration and ‘self-fashioning’. When the archive relaunched the project in 1981, recruiting volunteer observers to contribute personal diaries and responses to directives, it was this inheritance to which it laid claim. Mass Observation is, as its website puts it, ‘a ...”

“... His inspiring words for those with similar problems. Her words inciting the vulnerable to self-murder. It was as if no one had any experience of what she was describing (or the ability to imagine it), and therefore it couldn’t be true, only shamefully exploitative. Except that I recognised well enough the condition she described, whether or not she ...”

“... Nurses are tough subjects for biography. Their ethos of compassion and, sometimes, self-sacrifice can lead to hagiography or – when times change – invite satire. It’s hard to forget Lytton Strachey’s portrait of Florence Nightingale, her health broken by her exertions in the Crimea, issuing breathless directives on sanitary reform to the secretary of war, Sidney Herbert, and harrying him into an early grave ...”