“... Mozart. But the wonderful clear lines of the poetry carry a note of hesitancy, of the lack of self-knowledge behind Salieri’s bleak and self-righteous convictions. Is he perhaps animated by low envy, the involuntary hatred of the lesser for the great? The piece ends with such questions hanging in the air, and in our ...”

“... to be both in and out of the game, as Whitman put it – to have a private as well as a public self. Mark Twain went to great lengths to impose himself on the crowd, and he was a more successful performer than Messrs Vidal and Mailer, but he was also able to hold a self in reserve. For Hemingway it was all much more ...”

“... who ought to have known better, slavishly followed the American lead. Parsons, who is disarmingly self-critical in his attempts to find out ‘How we got it wrong’, says he deliberately refrained from offering the Shah advice on internal affairs, in case it interfered with the lucrative business of obtaining contracts, especially in the military ...”

“... for his heterogeneous essays of the 1950s, assembled as The Liberal Imagination and The Opposing Self. The ‘Honest Men’ were generalists, men of letters and purveyors of opinion in a tradition which emerged early in the 19th century with Jeffrey, Hazlitt, Macaulay, Carlyle and J.S. Mill, and in the 20th century included Orwell. Their idea-mongering ...”

“... now appear at the helm of a series that proposes to span the centuries, Medieval to Modern. The self-questioning that must have gone on before he led, or figureheaded, a number of volumes offering ‘Literature in History’ is indicated in his three-page General Editor’s Preface, where he hints, but does not spell out for the uninitiated, that it is too ...”

“... radicalism of the agents who flourished in the spring and summer of 1647 than to the intruded, self-righteous and mutinous idealism of the Levellers. The agents ‘always spoke out of their own experiences as soldiers, and mainly about the grievances of soldiers’. Yet by the autumn ‘unstable’, ‘excitable’, ‘violent’ men were to be found ...”

“... called Skink Tyree, a Vietnam vet liberal, who chooses to live on road kills, a swamp rat whose self-presentation is somewhere between Kris Kristofferson (in one of Peckinpah’s more unbuttoned ventures) and Gary Snyder. Neat prose to surf in short sharp bursts, each cross-cut segment with a hook in its tail. Impotent fantasies aimed against the ravages of ...”

“... combines a Nietzschean dissection of marital power relations with the sunny optimism of a self-help manual is very American and a little strange, but that women get less out of marriage because they need it more is an important insight. Does it follow that if women need marriage less they’ll get more out of it? Since ...”

“... but intensitive parental ‘ejections’ of Jane from childhood on to explain the withdrawn, self-protective manner of the adult woman. They were ‘frightening and unpleasant experiences over which she had no control and which required periods of recovery; they helped to form the “whimsical girl”, almost always well defended when it came so showing ...”

“... Since 1990, the economy has shrunk by 30 per cent, shattering the late Kim Il Sung’s dream of self-reliance. His son, Kim Jong Il, holds the reins of power in league with the Armed Forces, and both need the food aid to maintain their positions. The United States, not for the first time, is substituting ‘humanitarian assistance’ for foreign policy. Is ...”

“... Margaret is in the foreground, spotlit, while behind her Glenconner’s life plays out with such self-effacing matter-of-factness that it takes time for the reader to realise that of these two intertwined biographies Glenconner’s is by far the more remarkable. The book is not, as a whole, what the publishers have made it appear – another gossipy ...”

“... a young woman, whom he finds quite attractive, that the local diet of bread and bean paste seems self-mortifying. She reproves his unbridled appetites, then startles him by asking how a wish ‘to grip me tight and push part of your body into me’ comports with admiration for the beautiful and the good.Simón’s ...”

“... echoed around him throughout his life. But despite all that, Pope still looks like the most self-consciously canonical of 18th-century English poets, even though the canon has been exploded outwards, and even though the number of people who really love reading him is now, I would guess, less than a thousandth of what it was in 1720.He achieved this ...”

“... by EC Comics’ crime and horror output. Publishers responded with a Hays Code-style programme of self-censorship. EC closed all its titles except Mad magazine, and American comics became a little blander, until, in his own telling, Stan Lee came along and shook things up.Lee – the writer-editor who supervised the renaissance at Marvel Comics in the early ...”

“... fuel extraction have shifted tactics. Climate denialism in the 1990s was an overt and clearly self-interested lie, a conspiracy against science; the emphasis today is on broad-based movements that aggressively defend the fossil fuel way of life. Even with considerable funding from business, the big lie became hard to uphold; Exxon and BP now acknowledge ...”