“... has just seven academic staff and a handful of students; its chancellor is the psychologist and self-styled ‘professor against political correctness’, Jordan Peterson. Marshall’s son, Winston, has given guest lectures at the University of Austin in Texas, a new university that claims to focus on free speech and the ‘fearless pursuit of ...”

“... of In Memoriam and the fullest manuscript of ‘Maud’. The ramifications of Tennyson’s self-borowings can be followed more accurately and usefully; as for revision, two brief examples from ‘Maud’ may suffice to show the richness of the added material. In I iv the speaker has a vision of cruel and violent Nature: ‘And the whole little wood ...”

“... who suffers from it, and people in life are much more mysterious than people in literature. Any self-respecting student can tell you what King Lear’s madness was all about, or Lady Macbeth’s, or even Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ (true madness or feigned?). But I have ransacked the resources of Freud and Jung, cognitive and transactional ...”

“... though the occasions have passed. Shaw, like Keller, is aggressive, provocative, an unashamed self-presenter (in Shaw’s case self-promoter too, though of course not as musician); both are outrageously biased and flamboyantly exhibitionistic. The differences are that Shaw is wide-ranging, intellectually ...”

“... unshy predictions as to the revolutionising of American letters. Kerouac was never one to be self-effacing, but neither was he slow to praise the fluttering genius of his pals. ‘By virtue of my youth and enthusiasm and fire,’ Jack writes to Sebastian, of their friend Ian/Yann, he has been reborn: perhaps! But by virtue of his weary knowledge, his ...”

“... at the age of 31. Faulks also suggests that they lived and died in the shadow of war. This is self-evidently so with Hillary, while it can be plausibly argued that the slaughter of the Great War was a determining element in Wood’s background and that the Cold War contributed to Wolfenden’s early death. The trio differed in their sexuality – Wood was ...”

“... other extreme Catholicism, in a fraught political and emotional climate where everything from the self to the nation was open to invention. Declan Kiberd tries in this vast, wide-ranging book to find various contexts in which the literature of the Irish Renaissance can be placed. To write a deliberately new style, whether Hiberno-English or Whitmanian ...”

“... no institutional continuity. The theme of wounded male narcissism – the mower on a hot day mown, self-injured – may be one way of giving imaginative shape to what it feels like to live inside a new political bubble that’s stretched to bursting point. But let us first address what is known about the life of That Most Excellent Citizen and Uncorrupted ...”

“... literature concerned with the effects of technology on American arts and manners. Even the self-made idiom of Still the New World passes through distinct layers from having been evolved in separate stages of composition. A thoughtful chapter about the dependence of privacy, in the fictions of realism, on a threat of publicity and exposure, was first ...”

“... In the decades before and immediately following Independence, most Africans were either directly self-sufficient or part of an extended family that was – hardly anyone was more than one generation from the land. Politics was an urban pursuit, conducted at some distance from the realities of most peoples’ lives, and politicians could be certain that ...”

“... at the time, and have been preserved whole, what you find is a pervasive sentimentality, a strong self-referential tendency, a structure of iron logic. The Incorruptible was also the unpredictable. He was a fissiparous bundle of contradictions. He idealised ‘the people’ and profoundly distrusted anyone who claimed to speak for them. He distrusted the very ...”

“... people under the heel of American imperialism’ nor a ‘national minority’ in need of separate self-determination. His travels had moderated those views, but if he now recognised that racial oppression was endemic and transnational, he was still certain that it was shaped by local conditions and cultures, in ways that would dictate different ...”

“... calling him a ‘storyteller’, meaning that he wrote books that are both compelling and showily self-aware. Calvino himself embraced the description. The Uses of Literature, a selection of his non-fiction published in English in 1986, opens: ‘It all began with the first storyteller of the tribe.’ He is also called a fabulist, as much for his narrative ...”

“... at times, but monstrous nonetheless in the sheer scale of their lives and characters and in the self-belief that propelled what might have been, in smaller personalities, merely enthusiasms or inclinations onto the world stage. Lady Redesdale said that whenever she saw a headline beginning ‘Peer’s Daughter …’ she knew it would be one of hers. They ...”

“... although conceived as a ‘counter-commemoration’, his seven volumes had been integrated into a self-indulgent heritage culture, of whose vices he had always been well aware, but which would remain pervasive as long as France had not found a firm new footing in the world. This ingenious sophistry could not conceal that the whole enterprise of Les Lieux de ...”