“... and American versions of psychoanalysis with fantasies of boundaries and separateness and the self as a unique possession reflects this fear of jumble, and the terrors of exchange that can make the idea of the self into a prison. People’s lives as miscellaneous and contingent but still, or for that reason, narratable ...”

“... said to be the remains of monastic huts. A place, then, strongly associated in the Irish mind with self-denial, contemplation, spiritual renewal; a place, too, that has attracted writers like Sean O’Faolain, Denis Devlin, William Carleton and Patrick Kavanagh; a place where the individual might decently ruminate on his relationship with society.This setting ...”

“... though the emphasis was still on the plights and voices of their narrators, the sorrow and the self-pity. Hark, the new novel, is narrated in the third person and follows the thoughts of several characters, though there is a central loser, Fraz Penzig, who could be a cousin to Steve, Teabag or Milo. But the book isn’t entirely his, and the author’s ...”

“... the preface to his Collected Poems 1954 he expressed surprise at hearing in his poems ‘a buried self speaking, now and then, with such urgency’. And he liked that image so well that he later titled his autobiography, in a regrettable pun, The Buried Day. This implied division of the poet’s life into a surface self and ...”

“... greenham’ (of women keeping vigil outside a hospital). Here are the double-take paradoxes of low self-esteem congratulating itself: ‘If I hadn’t been drinking I’d have thought I’d been drinking.’ The Amis style, though, doesn’t altogether fit its new context. John Self would gorge himself on emetic burgers but ...”

“... with these books need not be apprehensive, however: The Truth about Lorin Jones is perfectly self-contained. Indeed, that self-contained quality helps to account for the powerful, painful oppressiveness of the book, as Polly Alter becomes more and more deeply enmeshed in her quest for the eponymous woman she is ...”

“... participation in the war is indicted, but only incidentally, in part because Wolff’s search for self is always centre-stage, in part because he identifies with Carver’s milieu, writes from the perspective of a grunt, to whose limited expectations he is loyal (unlike, say, Brecht, who also depicted war from a grunt’s perspective, but found its ...”

“... Francesca Woodman began taking photographs when she was 13; she committed suicide at 22. In her self-portraits she is always shadowy, indistinct, half-seen. Her pictures look like dreams re-created, printed onto photographic paper. In one she sits by a table covered in what look like family portraits. The light falls on her pale hands, illuminating ...”

“... an earlier remark that ‘every moment of my life is treacherous.’ This could all sound self-pitying, but Oldman manages another effect: a certain weariness, arising from exhaustion at never not having something sly to say.If we are looking for a storyline, for suspense and drama, or information, then we should probably try another film. Here Welles ...”

“... more important’ than the actions themselves is a scandal; it would require a degree of self-absorption beyond even him to be unaware that no motive at all can any longer seem sufficient as a justification measured against the consequences that his actions have helped to bring about in Iraq. The lowest point of this prolonged and empty charade of ...”

“... rights; an acolyte of established male writers who was nevertheless pugnaciously independent; a self-supporting woman of letters, but hopelessly derivative in her own writing. Some of the contemporary views of her are scathing, and she appears to have died a laughing stock of literary Paris. Her greatest achievement – of which she was justifiably proud ...”

“... draped across her ballooning mammaries as if what supports them – the whole roiling, but somehow self-balancing, bladder-work of breast, belly, buttocks, thighs – was a separate person or non-person, whom the woman had learned to be patient with, almost to placate. Maybe ‘giant’ and ‘monster’ are helpful. Maybe not. I look again at the reality of ...”

“... after the deaths of friends and relations. The result is a curiously artless exercise in self-revelation. Strong was a child of interwar Metroland, which he hated. Born at 23 Colne Road, Winchmore Hill, into a landscape of privet hedges, crazy paving and hanging baskets, he was one of three sons of George and Mabel Strong. George was a travelling ...”

“... who succeeded in getting an education and, eventually, his freedom. Images of freedom, slavery and self-belonging (oikoiesis) recur in his teaching. ‘A slave is always praying to be set free,’ he writes. He evokes the horrors of enslavement by describing the suffering of caged animals and birds that refuse to eat in captivity and starve to death, though he ...”

“... stories in which she emerged, if not triumphant, at least unbowed. And then, having brought her self-and-history-making up to date, she would go to sleep. At three, Emily abruptly stopped her night talking, nobody knows why. Perhaps she had done with nappies. Perhaps she had sorted out the past tense. Perhaps she found the recorder. More probably she had ...”