“... beyond repression. What these women experience is closer to a wipeout of identity in which all self-knowledge or self-recognition is lost: ‘I did not know who I was any more’; ‘I do not appear to exist’; ‘It is as if you are inside a grave.’ For the migrant woman, as she tries and fails to make sense of an ...”

“... prestige of France. When they finally met, de Estrada unwittingly snubbed Napoleon’s progressive self-image by explaining that Mexico needed ‘a dictatorship on the pattern established in France’. But this didn’t prevent the two men from plotting regime change. French forces were to accompany a British naval operation aimed at punishing Juárez for ...”

“... published in 1981 as Too Late to Turn Back, Paul Theroux describes her as ‘modest and a bit self-mocking’. At one point she recounts her attempts to tell a rural Liberian schoolteacher about her home town: ‘The London I had described of crowds, and hurrying motor vehicles, noise and underground trains, that was terrifying. It all sounded ...”

“... Wilson, though hardly a firebrand, issued the principles of a new world order of which national self-determination would be a key component. The following January, an assembly of Irish MPs, elected to Westminster on the abstentionist ticket, met in Dublin to found the second Irish Republic; the first had been proclaimed by the leaders of the Rising in ...”

“... and early death. In keeping with long-established (but soon to be much reduced) traditions of self-improvement, he educated himself in some of the larger questions of demography and policy that underlay the figures which were his daily business, and in his early thirties began to publish articles and books on these topics. The Second World War opened up ...”

“... mature women of vaguely Eastern European origin who used sex to drain men of money, status and self-esteem before discarding them – and then to the more youthful flappers, with their casual disregard for social and moral convention. In 1926 MGM cast the unequivocally European Garbo in two vamp films, Torrent and The Temptress. In both, she sinks her ...”

“... solitary crossing of the desert, the painful abandonment of the ‘seduction theory’, the heroic self-analysis, the tearing away from the transference on Wilhelm Fliess, the stoicism in the face of his colleagues’ attacks.It is a nice story, but we now know it to be nothing but a vast ‘legend’ (Henri Ellenberger). One after another, historians of ...”

“... an unusually reflective activist, and defeat seems only to have sharpened his mind. He writes with self-deprecating, rueful wit about what some might view as his quixotic involvement with Israel’s anti-Zionist left. History hasn’t followed Matzpen’s script for permanent revolution in the Middle East, and Warschawski, chastened by events, writes that ...”

“... this poem as remarkably unkind and accusatory. How does the poet know so much about Margaret’s self-concern? Is he right about her? Do we all have to feel the way Margaret is said to? But recently I have come to hear the stress differently. It is not that Margaret is mourning only for herself; just that she is mourning for herself, whatever else she may be ...”

“... What would have been an invaluable record of Charles Burney’s indefatigable efforts at self-advancement was replaced by her Memoirs of Dr Burney (1832), a canonisation of him and a celebration of her own literary career. (‘Fanny’s last novel’, Roger Lonsdale called it in his biography of Charles Burney.) Yet she recovered and left to us a ...”

“... jaw right to the skull. He tried to maintain contact not just with H.D. but also with his prewar self. To an American patron, the Reverend Charles Bubb, whose small press would publish books by Aldington and H.D., he wrote in 1917 that ‘until I joined the army I had lived with dreams, books and love – the shock of change was too abrupt and I still feel ...”

“... 1967 her older sister confirmed that the handwriting could have been hers). It is a Pooterish, self-pitying document, whose author laments her failure to win the lottery (‘So I am not going to be rich after all’). Her other regrets include Hitler’s not giving her a dachshund for her birthday and his neglect of her for months at a time (‘So he has a ...”

“... Melville’s narrator. By 1855 in New York they were the third largest occupational group. Their self-esteem as their numbers grew was not shared: ‘Nothing about clerical labour was congenial to the way most Americans thought of work … At best, it seemed to reproduce things … the bodies of real workers were sinewy, tanned by the relentless sun, or ...”

“... be strong enough to walk unsupported for possibly a month in all’. Blue Nights, a more anxious, self-questioning book than The Year of Magical Thinking, is about fear, Didion’s and Quintana’s principally: fear of being abandoned, of time passing, of losing control, of dying; and about the memory of a time between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s when ...”

“... deferred. Christina Rossetti’s brother once wrote that she was ‘replete with the spirit of self-postponement’, and in that regard at least she resembled her more eminent male contemporary. For Tennyson’s lyrics are repeatedly, charismatically preoccupied by the idea of lives on hold, each moment of them informed by an unfocused sense of utter ...”