“... the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and screeching, the mechanical gouging that attends the uncivil engineering projects that ...”

“... gives them a compelling honesty and edge. In his novels, he sought to explore the parts of the self which most of us seek to conceal. He was also concerned with style, with how you write a sentence, how you control the music and rhythms of prose. Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924, the eldest of a large family. His father died when he was 19. ‘On the ...”

“... David Bindman, who has studied the picture closely for thirty years, proposed that it is in fact a self-portrait, painted by Williams himself.What is the intent of the image and what is created by its beholders? The problem of Francis Williams’s portrait shows the degree to which personal identity depends on both. Three hundred years after Williams lived, it ...”

“... to work. Though he defended the genre in essays, his sometime resentment shows up in his many self-hating low-status protagonists: unappreciated and underemployed repairmen, a designer of Barbie-doll props, a man who ‘retreads’ used tyres to be sold as new. SF fans honoured Dick early, giving their highest award, the Hugo, to The Man in the High ...”

“... cultural celebrity by the vogue for working-class sentimentalism in the 1960s and lefter-than-thou self-righteousness in the 1970s. In the immediate aftermath of his death, positive assessments understandably predominated. Some moving tributes appeared as former comrades, colleagues and students tried to take stock, emotionally and personally as well as in ...”

“... as he put it, ‘almost for “fun”’, this combination of expressionist political fable and self-pitying fantasy is Hamilton’s most arresting novel. The Slaves of Solitude, its follow-up, was assembled much more painfully. Hamilton finished it by taking to his bed in Henley early in 1946, not long after Bruce had worked out that he was spending £2000 ...”

“... she meant what she said and no more. Readers of her memoirs may see her as an irritating and self-regarding woman, but they will also remember her frankness about her early sexual experiences; she was not a fool, and not someone who lacked self-awareness. It’s questionable, anyway, if her personal feelings mattered ...”

“... her, then casts him aside for the newly returned Clym … What does she want? … some form of self realisation … to attain herself. She does not know how … so romantic imagination says Paris and the beau monde. As if that would stay her unsatisfaction. Clym has found out the vanity of Paris and the beau monde. What then does he want? … his ...”

“... its skyline mangled by ‘the erection of tall buildings, especially if they are of eccentric or self-promoting “iconic” design’, its scattered structure filled in through ‘central government’s quite gratuitous policy of “densification”’, ease of living made all but impossible for anyone other than the very wealthy, with a property bubble ...”

“... poetry of a child, volcanic, and unreasoning.’ These remarks pick up on Thomas’s own line in self-representation, a fascination with premature experience which was manifest not just in his life and letters but in his poems too. ‘Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs/About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green’: no modern ...”

“... up anger. Above all, he read the marches last January as a massive show of anti-egalitarian self-regard, when those who took part or looked on with pride saw them as an affirmation of French values, including freedom of expression. Todd’s mode of delivery, a mixture of abrasiveness and superiority, has added to the offence: Who is Charlie? is laden ...”

“... as the chief goal of contemporary art; both are emanations of a love of the self, ‘the sacred cow of today’s culture’. (The briefest hop takes the reader from here to Culture of Complaint, though in this book, characteristically, both narcissism and post-structuralist anti-narcissism, defined as the belief that ‘the subject ...”

“... with ‘lukewarm’ poetry was not a consideration. In ‘The King’ (1894), Kipling shows him self fully aware of his aesthetic position which is completely counter to Arnold, who felt Victorian England to be intractably unpoetic – a supposition indubitably correct in his own case, as a glance at ‘East London’ and ‘West London’ will ...”

“... the one case in a million where judicial wrongdoing might go unredressed. This is not quite as self-interested as it sounds. The threat of litigation which hangs over every American operating theatre and consulting room, and increasingly over every British one too, has a palpable effect on the way medicine is practised. Undoubtedly the fear of litigation ...”

“... this at face value (he sometimes resorted to this reductive idiom to ward off any suspicion of self-importance; he was in fact delighted that Faber’s new firm was willing to publish, in effect, an interim ‘collected’), the need he felt to make a fresh start poetically seems genuine enough. But it didn’t come easily: in fact, in the years covered ...”