“... how ‘the idea of the poet’ framed literary lives from Keats onwards. Richard Helgerson’s Self-Crowned Laureates (1983) does the same for the English Renaissance. The title of The Great Pretender is triple-loaded: the hero Ben Janis is a claimant for poetic fame, a laureate hoping to crown himself. His claims, he suspects with some justice, are a ...”

“... serving officers to discuss their profession in print. These scribbling fellows could be ruthless self-advertisers, like Churchill and Baden-Powell. There was nothing wrong with an officer giving himself a manly pseudonym and writing about pig-sticking in Blackwood’s – or, of course, with a general writing his memoirs on retirement. Today serving officers ...”

“... novel ever is – into the cultural mainstream, largely as a result of Capote’s shrewd gift for self-promotion. Capote’s gifts as a stylist and storyteller are more accessible in his second novel – novella, really – The Grass Harp, and in his early stories. Like his debut, The Grass Harp concerns the childhood of a sensitive Southern male orphan ...”

“... of well-being isn’t so much a first principle as a tautology. He’s posited a single, final, self-evident desideratum and christened it ‘well-being’. No doubt he’s pleased to have avoided the survival trap of evolutionary psychology, but he has had to invent an empty category to do it. He can’t let the category stay empty for long. Neuroimaging ...”

“... simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it.’ Wallace didn’t believe that this self-consciousness could be put back in its box or neutralised by the prelapsarian gestures of a book like The Marriage Plot, and sought to marry the formal mechanics and self-consciousness of postmodernism with the moral and ...”

“... when she libelled a whole village; and now the third, Aftermath, has brought Cusk charges of self-absorption, narcissism, condescension, commercialism, cruelty towards her children, too much revelation, not enough revelation, naivety, grandiloquence, ice in her heart and a lack of a sense of humour. Cusk has put the vitriol down to people not being able ...”

“... the guest quarters.’ We are clearly in the world of Nothing On here. But we’re also in the self-aware, self-consciously theatrical world of Noises Off. Skios just about observes the classical unities of place (the island of Skios), time (a single 24-hour period) and action: everything that happens has its place in ...”

“... how safe Kim would be at home, her social network, her psychiatric history and history of self-harm. I was increasingly impressed with her friend, whom I began to feel sure I had met before. Of the 1500 or so patients registered with me, I know about a hundred by name. They are the ones I see often or whose illnesses have made a particular ...”

“... ensues, the name is presumably derived from ‘tally-ho!’). It is a witty study of hypocritical self-interest and genuine self-doubt – the young poet dislikes his first encounter with the sea because of the banality of his response to it, and the ‘trashy comparisons’ it provokes – which gradually turns ...”

“... in the Dáil to explain what he regretted most about his time at the wheel: the failure of a self-aggrandising stadium project in Dublin, nicknamed the ‘Bertie Bowl’, which had led his own coalition partners to compare him to Nicolae Ceausescu. With this mea culpa went the news that the man of the people would be drawing a pension of almost ...”

“... to deal with social problems; and their demands and ideas were also being highlighted in the newly self-confident press. The radically oppositional 19th-century ‘intelligentsia’ had not disappeared, but was gradually dissolving into a broader, more pragmatic and more diverse middle class. These are the developments which form the substance of Dowler’s ...”

“... in 301 he sent in his stepson Magas as military governor; in 275 Magas rebelled, and ruled as the self-appointed king of Cyrenaica from 275 to 250. We well may wonder how such a démarche affected Callimachus. A citizen of Cyrene with a government-sponsored job in Ptolemaic Egypt clearly had to watch his step, and not solely on account of intermittent ...”

“... movement, which encouraged Hindus and Muslims to come together to burn foreign goods and demand self-rule. ‘Their thirst for conquest is endless,’ Siraj says at one point of ‘the foreigner’. In 1908, the myth of the Black Hole was emphatically put in its place by a student of Akshaykumar Maitreya, who wrote: We do not believe that there ever ...”

“... that, as Powell said on his retirement in 1987, would have seemed ‘incredible’ to his younger self and remained ‘incomprehensible’. What he could not comprehend was the abnegation of national sovereignty. Alienated and alarmed, baffled and betrayed, Powell was ready to scheme tactically with the Labour Party, and sat in the Commons as an Ulster ...”

“... and any attunement to religion has been filtered out. The effect is to make him not just self-taught – as he was known to be – but self-made, and to turn him into an unconsoled scrutiniser of mortality, a sort of outsider artist. It’s true that one of his teatrini depicting the effects of syphilis is ...”