“... a plan to make the world ‘safe for democracy’. Inspired by Wilson’s advocacy of national self-determination, Ho sought an audience with the US president, hoping to persuade him to use his new influence to restore Vietnamese rule in French Indo-China. He carefully quoted from the US Declaration of Independence in his petition. In Manela’s more ...”

“... on a grant, the easy-if-you’re-young-and-single 1980s dole. So he’s well read and fittingly self-conscious, aware that the unease he feels is not his alone, but one of the classic modernist positions. He’d like to be ‘no more than a single human man’, in the words of his hero, DHL, but somehow finds himself more like Kierkegaard’s unhappiest ...”

“... within weeks his flimsy cover had been blown, and ‘The Opium-Eater’ became a transparent and self-advertising pseudonym that he cultivated for the rest of his improbably long life. By 1840 the Opium-Eater had taken on a cosmopolitan life of his own. Gogol adapted his London dream-wanderings to St Petersburg in Nevsky Prospekt; in America the Confessions ...”

“... Karl Kraus. The Kraus Project is Franzen’s reckoning with his undergraduate self; with his ambitions and frustrations; with his completist tendencies to let no juvenilia go to waste and no headline go unremarked; and with the publishing legacy of the generation of the 1960s and 1970s. That was the era when Pynchon, Barth and Coover were ...”

“... 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 ...”