“... factor in overcoming her resistance to marriage. Sylvia’s Lovers (1863) is built around a more self-serving deception: Philip, in love with Sylvia, conceals from her that her accepted suitor, taken by a press gang, has promised to return to her. Wives and Daughters (1866) has two concealed relationships: a secret marriage and a case of romantic ...”

“... individual … no longer lived and breathed. She desired nothing but his dominion over her abased self.’ Lawrence is marvellous, but his effect on other writers is usually a bad thing.So how come The Shutter of Snow is so interesting? The toughie cool modernists in 1920s Paris were probably a better model for Coleman’s style, reining in the prolixity on ...”

“... Take this one, from ‘How to Be an Other Woman’, the first story in Moore’s first book, Self-Help (1985), in which Charlene is having an affair with a married man. He rings her while she’s at work: ‘Hi, this is Attila,’ he says in a false deep voice when you pick up your office phone. Giggle. Like an idiot. Say: ‘Oh. Hi, Hun.’ It’s ...”

“... complacently celebrating Poland’s ‘return to Europe’, we should be trying to understand why self-declared anti-liberals succeeded in the first place, and in what ways their politics might endure even if they lose at the polls.In The New Politics of Poland Jarosław Kuisz offers a competent and well-written account of the larger forces at work in PiS’s ...”

“... to represent themselves, albeit within the limits of the categories offered.Back in 1939, however, self-identification was not on the agenda. Instead, the bureau created scenarios – each, Bouk says, ‘amounting almost to a short story’ – for would-be enumerators to disentangle. What was the race of a child born to a white man and a Japanese woman? Or ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... surgeons in a routine by William Burroughs. The paper Caesarean section was performed blind by the self-taught painter-poet Brion Gysin. While cutting mounts for a drawing, he sliced through several layers of newsprint beneath the card. Promoting the implications of his accident to the other inmates at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur, he described the way he ‘picked up ...”

“... Anna his Antigone. Miller’s struggle for the succession brought to the surface the complex and self-contradictory nature of psychoanalysis as a family affair, its members united by blood, or by marriage, or by transferential bond. Jacques-Alain Miller entered Lacan’s world at a fateful moment. In October 1963, Miller, then 19, had just completed his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”