“... only pretending to care to make heaps of cash? Mark Halyard is the wrong kind of people. A self-professed ‘extinction industry cunt’, the only animals he appears to care about are dogs: ‘If [they] ever went extinct – that’s totally different.’ The mining company he works for is drilling into the last known habitat of the venomous ...”

“... in confinement as both juvenile and adult, and grew up largely on the San Francisco streets with a self-taught sage called Mo as a teacher, but he can certainly turn a sentence:Mo was always muttering apocalyptic shit from the start, so it wasn’t obvious right away when it started coming more often and at a higher pitch. Especially because the words were the ...”

“... in a stimulating introduction to a facsimile reprint of John Sym’s Life’s Preservative against Self-Killing (1637), strengthened and deepened Medieval arguments that suicide, which was seen as prompted by the Devil, was the greatest sin against God. The number of suicides reported to the court of King’s Bench had risen sharply in the early 16th century ...”

“... It is odd how much decades matter. The Twenties evoke an unmistakable image of self-consciously post-war modernity and frivolity; the Thirties of ideological polarisation in the face of the twin challenge of depression and dictatorship; the Forties of plain living and high thinking about the world after Hitler; the Fifties of affluence and complacency and the end of ideology ...”

“... Central European scepticism’. This involves, Havel says, ‘a deepened sense of irony and self-irony, together with humour and black humour, and perhaps most important in this context, an intense fear of exaggerating our own dignity unintentionally to a comic degree, a fear of pathos and sentimentality, of overstatement and of what Kundera calls the ...”

“... hold out: ‘Our biggest surprise,’ he said, ‘is that juche (Kim II Sung’s strategy of ‘self-reliance’) actually seems to work – if at a very high cost.’ But reunification will also proceed cautiously because the participants recognise that, while the process will lead to the disappearance of only one state (the North), it could bring about ...”

“... 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 ...”