“... indeed fructify in abundance for the majority of people, not just for the chosen or even the self-chosen few ... ’ Crick often praises Orwell’s style, and even observes its progressive refinement. He must have been conscious throughout of a formidable reader over his shoulder: but he evidently did not ask himself how many faults Orwell would have ...”

“... and patient exploration, in which (often against much resistance and spite and lack of faith in self and life) all sorts of healthy and human potentials came to light: potentials which had somehow survived twenty years of severe Tourette’s and ‘Touretty’ life, hidden in the deepest and strongest core of the personality. This deep exploration was ...”

“... are two Kincaids: Elaine Potter Richardson, the daughter of the domineering Annie Drew, and the self-fashioning writer, Jamaica Kincaid. In Kincaid’s fictional world, to be someone’s daughter is to carry a great burden. To become yourself, you must reject, kill, refuse the mother, leave home, write books and essays against her, marry a white man, build ...”

“... influences’, while at the same time rebutting claims of racial inferiority and agitating for self-government in West Africa. Respect and disdain for British society fostered a belief in national self-government, which would play out in the politics of the next generation of students. The rise of racism and national ...”

“... subjects. She has warned readers not to mistake the ‘I’ in her poems for straightforward self-expression. ‘When I use the autobiographical, it is as artifice. It is not an invitation to witness transparency,’ she says in Salvage. ‘Where it appears, it will have been pored over, turned over, analysed, refashioned as art and made theoretical ...”

“... a state-imposed exile from the centres of imperial power in St Petersburg and Moscow and then to a self-imposed flight to the West. Herzen initially found inspiration in the French Revolution, but the suffocating bourgeois capitalism that had triumphed across Europe and culminated in the failed revolution of 1848 led him to seek alternatives elsewhere. Before ...”

“... the ‘true Sudan thirst’, which amounted to the ‘perpetual liquefaction and evaporation’ of self. This could be tackled only with an evening regime of comprehensive rehydration beginning with tea and ending with ‘that triumphant blend of all whetting flavours, an Abu Hamed – gin, vermouth, Angostura, lime-juice, soda’. Once Anglo-Saxon drinkers ...”

“... doted on brothers and followed their careers anxiously, not being given similar opportunities for self-expression through gainful employment. Yes, the Victorian world was filled with status-seekers who complained incessantly about income and nursed social slights while prattling on about duty. Yes, the young Matthew Arnold, even the aging, egregiously ...”

“... For biography still flourishes – albeit on a reduced scale and with diminished intellectual self-confidence – both within and without the walls of academe. In one guise, it has been reincarnated as prosopography, which stresses backgrounds rather than opinions, collective behaviour in preference to individual diversity, in the (usually vain) hope of ...”

“... man: his profoundly anti-Wildean commitment to the importance of being earnest in an age of irony, self-consciously stylish order and allusively ambiguous myth. For Lawrence was undeniably earnest, despite his famous gift for mimicry, his high spirits, his sense of the comic. His Modernism – eventually his anti-Modernism – sought in all seriousness to ...”

“... it ‘pares the questions down to their essence, forcing us to think about what we mean by the self, whether we are our genes’. ‘If a clone is created,’ she asks, ‘how could its soul be different from the soul of the person who is being cloned?’ (This is only a small sample of the many similar passages that frame the central ...”

“... director at the time of Webb’s death in 1947: ‘Our founder was wiser than most and less self-regarding. Having set the School on its feet, he never attempted to impose his own views.’ But not through mere modesty. Webbian claims to superior expertise were in a sense institutionalised with the foundation of the School. Dahrendorf goes so far as to ...”

“... its innovative goals and practices, its productive methods, distribution systems and theoretical self-representations – all these things distinctly recall the situation of the early Modernist poetries which Jack Butler Yeats denounced. Indeed, what he had to say of those poets loved of Ezra Pound has been said, and continues to be said, of the poets and ...”

“... repress a harsh answer, to confess to a fault, and to stop (right or wrong) in the midst of self-defence, in gentle submission’. The advice of The Mother’s Assistant and Young Lady’s Friend was ‘Always conciliate,’ and The Lady’s Amaranth stated that a woman governs by ‘persuasion ... The empire of woman is an empire of softness ... her ...”

“... and compassion as ‘drool and drivel’ – Mrs Thatcher was supremely herself. In the process of self-revelation, she managed to confirm every adverse stereotype of her style and values with which her opponents had hoped to make the electorate’s flesh creep. Nevertheless, in the event, fear of Labour exceeded fear of Mrs Thatcher. The Tory tune drowned out ...”