“... things – was so generalised for children of that period as to be unremarkable. The dream of a self-sufficient, ‘de-anglicised’ Irish culture was still alive for many who had grown up around the advent of independence, and, if anything, had only been made more vivid in the years after the Second World War by the attendant notion that an authentic ...”

“... that Chatterton raises in his attack on Walpole, and concentrates instead on pride and poetic self-deification. As an exemplar of the egotistical sublime, Wordsworth’s Chatterton makes Rowley the idol of his pride, the projection of what Hobbes called ‘gloriation of mind’. But even this elevates more than it deserves a literary daring that sprang ...”

“... Or something like it? We are heading into dangerous territory here, as neither Tessa, for all her self-consciousness, nor her creator seems to find anything a bit silly about this clichéd encounter between an Anglo-Saxon woman on holiday and an earthy foreign type. Given Kane’s capacity to micro-analyse her characters’ motivations, this lapse seems ...”

“... to his non-fiction: the loosely structured, discursive essays he favours easily accommodate self-reflection and digression. This means that he has more of an opportunity to write about what really interests him – which, most of the time, is himself. Dyer’s last work of non-fiction was an autobiographical essay entitled Out of Sheer Rage, which is ...”

“... can generate is itself. The gloom never quite lifts. ‘The desire to exploit the possibilities of self-transformation may burn bright in the cosmetic and surgical industries,’ Warner acknowledges towards the end of this demanding, immensely rewarding book, ‘but stories disclose a growing unease with the menace of different selves taking over the real ...”

“... hunt for those you get on with. On what level, though, do I meet their host? In a sense, he’s self-effacing: he speaks second person, forever exclaiming you! Other humans are what he cares for, and nothing could matter more. A pompous nouveau riche; a ragged fisher-boy; that African lad and a jester in blackface; a crazy old lady in the local and a posh ...”

“... Cuba as ‘the capital of 21st-century communism’, must rank as one of the most deranged self-denunciations on record. Across its hundred pages, the report paints Cuba as the centre of hemispheric subversion, bent on destroying the United States through a ‘long war of attrition’ that made use of ‘espionage, infiltration, sabotage, proxy ...”

“... it is the most strenuous act of the poetic mind. Hopkins therefore commands himself – in a self-directed imperative, a form not uncommon in poetry – to ‘buckle’ those psychically assimilated qualities to his own ‘stirred’ heart, alchemising them into the subjective world of feeling, and thereby generating the imagination that renders them ...”

“... worked on making the plane at home – was an unusual man. He had a seriousness of purpose and a self-directed, unphoney Ohio groundedness, and he was extraordinarily calm about loudly and repeatedly being called a liar and a fake. The entirely unfounded refusal to believe in his feats had no effect on him. He knew what he and Orville had done, knew that the ...”

“... shot through with personal grudges and unverifiable anecdotes – portrayed a deceitful, self-deceiving man; Thompson introduced Frost’s Selected Letters by noting his ‘manner of seeming to be so natural, direct and confiding in all forms of communication; but he was never as natural as he seemed.’ Sheehy, Richardson and Faggen are keen to set ...”

“... resonant images came more naturally to him. And it was cadence and image that energised him, not self-revelation. In a letter from 1960, before he had published anything, he wrote: ‘The common notion that you can make art out of your life, refinement of pleasure etc, is pure moonshine as far as I see it. There must be some morality. You might as well call ...”

“... been led by their subject. The first room is a pure piece of crowd-pleasing twaddle, filled with self-portraits from across Sickert’s career, some of them important works, that have been sundered from their natural bedfellows elsewhere. (More on this later.)Sickert would not have been Sickert without two early mentors, Whistler and Degas. He was a ...”

“... ethically fundamental. There is a shift from ‘Apparently altruistic behaviour is commonly self-seeking’ (which continues to privilege real altruism as a virtue) to ‘Altruism, pity etc are themselves contemptible, forms of weakness, a lowering of health’ (the notorious attack on pity in Antichrist is of this kind). Yet even in these shocking ...”

“... he wrote in a newspaper article in 1917, to renounce lascivious aestheticism and exoticism, the self-betraying tendency to barbarism it pandered to in an unbridled way, taboo crazes in clothes styles and foolish infantilisms in its art, and adopt an attitude of noble rejection of anthropophagic sculpture and South American harbour-saloon dances … Yes, let ...”

“... or calming. And it is oneself one is trying to tame, not just the other. The other in sex is the self we desire and fear.Dominance and submission … I am guessing that this is the aspect of Delacroix’s vision that most makes present-day viewers wince. But Delacroix is unequivocal. Maybe in the years following Sardanapalus he decided not to state the case ...”