“... sort of thing, intoning against ‘the dialogue of the mind with itself’. But Clough saw that self-dialogue could be a cure as well as a disease, or at least a way of being less dutiful towards your discontentments. Throughout the poems you can sense the secret glee of the pious schoolboy who once confessed in his diary: ‘Feel almost inclined to sin ...”

“... are closer to the attitude of the artist-photographer Claude Cahun, who staged a series of self-portraits in all kinds of personae, and wrote a little book of Heroines, in which Helen of Troy begins her tale: ‘I know I am very ugly, but I try to forget it. I play at being this beautiful young girl.’ When Angela Carter reworked the myth of Helen of ...”

“... matter. Woman is Animal. Yet, as Warner points out, Woman functions in the myths as the animal self more effectively where there is a belief in the value of the ‘civilised’. When ‘nature’ is seen as aggression, and aggression is to be highly valued – in the dog-eat-dog world of the Stock Exchange and in Robert Bly’s drum-beating – then Woman ...”

“... they wanted out of life, and how they should behave towards other people, in order to generate self-respect as well as respect from others. That respect included approval from the priestly caste of a religion which had started out a thousand years before by saying a great deal about love and forgiveness, and which early on had experienced some difficulty ...”

“... Its main city is Qamishli, which feels a long way from the war. This is a fertile and largely self-sufficient region of wheat fields and oil wells, though few are still operating. Further west is the canton that surrounds the devastated town of Kobani, which Islamic State failed to capture despite a four-and-a-half-month siege that ended in January when ...”

“... hegemony go hand in hand with something much more mundane: a tendency among their leaders to seek self-enrichment. Authoritarianism goes hand in hand with kleptocracy (a term coined by the Polish-British sociologist Stanislav Andreski in the late 1960s). The straightforward explanation is that the absence of legal and political constraints makes ...”

“... his life thereafter. Browne goes so far as to compare his Kentish country house, Down, to a ‘self-contained, self-regulating scientific ship methodically ploughing onwards through the waves outside . . . almost as if he were on the Beagle again, sailing into some unknown port, where people felt it was a natural ...”

“... of commerce in the world’, and the British Empire had always been – at least in its self-representation – concerned overwhelmingly with trade. Hence Charles II’s abortive attempt to transform Tangier, in Pepys’s words, into the ‘most considerable place the King of England hath in the world’. Tangier is also crucial to Colley’s ...”

“... of that peculiar mixture of diary and epistolary novel, spontaneous outpouring and literary self-consciousness, that gives the Memoirs their peculiar tone, and for which they deserve to be taken more seriously than they have been yet. The book is uneven, it is too long, and it runs out of steam towards the end, partly, as Wilson explains, because the ...”

“... a wooden performer. She became an actor when she found a way of presenting herself on screen, the self she presented being in two senses a Hollywood creation: both the kind of person the milieu permitted, and also the package sold to the world through her relationship to the press. The quality those directors found was not the natural woman from Grabtown, but ...”

“... 25: Once hope of a cure is extinguished in the newly blind adult, there is typically a period of self-mourning, in which the individual retreats from ordinary interaction. Often they speak little, respond tersely if at all to questions, and spend long hours sitting almost motionless. It is an insulative emotional mechanism, an understandable grief response ...”

“... person with the power is always the one who cares less.’ There are countless other examples of self-repetition. One for My Baby appears to have been untouched by any editorial hand, or at least by an editorial hand that had also bothered to pick up Man and Boy. There is even one scene of sexual congress – a crucial plot point, as Parsons’s manuals ...”

“... a fictional cast of mind, a willingness to make yourself up as you go along, to score out the old self and start again on a new page: in Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1990), Raban adopts a different identity (John Rayburn, Rainbird) for each place he visits. In Waxwings, set in the ‘virtual city’ of Seattle at the height of the dot.com boom, American reality ...”

“... version of Dan Leno: he does songs, he falls on his arse, he has trouble with machines, with self-worth, and he goes in for disguises, catchphrases, patter and multiple personalities. The old comics were human, of course, but the startling thing about the newer television cartoon characters is that they often appear more human than real people, more ...”

“... But Lawrence wasn’t all that interested in ur-versions of his poems: the more he threw off self-censorship, and the set forms and other tasteful packaging which came with it, the more he wanted the poems to feel like drafts. If free verse meant ‘there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished’ then his poems’ artistic quality would lie ...”