“... about Pompey and Caesar.’ It’s easy to forget, because we know what happened next, but also self-evidently true, as we know from our own experience: however horrifying the political catastrophe unfolding around us, we still devote ourselves primarily to the interpersonal and institutional jostling of our own little lives. So it was at Rome, and in those ...”

“... it was nicknamed the ‘lunch-hour abortion’. Women’s liberation activists running their own self-help clinic began studying Karman’s method. One member, Lorraine Rothman, noticed a dangerous oversight: there was no valve to stop air passing into the uterus. Using easily acquired materials – aquarium tubing, a Mason jar – Rothman made a menstrual ...”

“... have your last view of the nation, The river of a darkening capital And its diamond clusters of self-love. You could write now of good misdirected And innocence betrayed, but the deadline has come, Only the foghorns wail like creatures from Prehistory: Speak to us, who cannot see Where we are going or know what is ...”

“... up on the sofa, feet criss-crossed with tan lines from her sandals (the day sleeper in an act of self-care). What was once plainly political has become familial, casual, intimate, or all of those together, and then back round to political again. When I look at Lange’s daughter-in-law sleeping, I remember that the US is the only OECD country where women ...”

“... you ever kill a fish. I was once but now I am human. I have imagination. I want to love. I have self-interest. Things are not me. Do you have another question. I am haunted but by what? Human supremacy? The work of humiliation. The pungency of the pesticide. What else? The hammer that comes down on the head. Knocks the eyes out. I was very ...”

“... Edgar Middleton, who called his autobiography I Might Have Been a Success. She also produced self-portraits in which the camera looks like a metallic face. In 1968, she pictured herself in perky miniature, beside a massive studio camera. She is shackled to the great beast by a cable, which could also be a ...”

“... they have more character than the young lady at the clavichord, or even the painter himself. In a self-portrait you notice the bright pages of the large, open folio on which his hand rests before you look at his face. The eye is unwilling to leave the still lifes. Given that, sometimes at least, they are there to be read emblematically, this is not exactly a ...”

“... There is something in the nature of the place, a residue of royalty and privilege and congenital self-satisfaction: the old dockside dowager has painted herself up for the punters, while revising her lurid past in amnesiac tourist brochures. Clap sores revamped as beauty spots. PR operatives delight in being both economical and spendthrift with the ...”

“... subject addressed him. He bore the two first names that might be deemed appropriate to a divided self: Robert and Cal (for Caligula, and perhaps Caliban). According to Elizabeth Hardwick, ‘his fate was like a strange, almost mythical two-engined machine, one running to doom and the other to salvation.’ This is the language of the romantic tradition, and ...”

“... sonnet 129, and says he takes ‘a single-minded expository view of the poem, as though it were a self-consistent sermon’. For Vendler, the verbal imagination’s true intent is ‘always to make a chain of interesting signifiers, with the ‘message’ tucked in as best the poet can’. And she says that because many readers prefer to think of the Sonnets ...”

“... court social worker had told the prison escort service about William’s recent history of self-harm, so he was monitored during the journey from Glasgow to Polmont. When he arrived he was placed on Talk to Me (TTM), a scheme for prisoners deemed at risk of suicide. Those perceived to be at highest risk should be assigned a ‘Safer Cell’ and checked ...”

“... wasn’t just American, but freakishly American, and like any good scout was both pathologically self-assured and incurably naive. David Foster Wallace said that he spoke like ‘Jimmy Stewart on acid’ (though Lynch’s addictions were the diner-appropriate kind: coffee, sugar, cigarettes). Whatever the contradiction – mainstream ...”

“... is not at all in Davie’s line, and that, in the Cowper poem, the word was not a programme but a self-accusation. He leaves such superficialities far behind him: he has matter to convey. His face is indeed set against letting the morbid fancy roam, but he does not shrink from horror; he insists only that it should be squarely faced and soberly spoken of, and ...”

“... apparently strikes more deeply than the surface nostalgia of the Sixties; it accords with a female self-respect founded on notions of integrity which need have nothing to do with traditional domestic life. The fully-fashioned skirts, the richly shirred ruffles, the truly beautiful small prints and the pure cotton cloth connote the lack of compromise about ...”