“... or sadness.Fathers are depicted as pathetic and clueless, or untrustworthy and despairing, or self-mutilating and emasculated. Remy, the keyboardist in Memorial Device, is said to have come ‘from a long line of homos’; his ‘father had become a eunuch in a backstreet operation … after hooking up with a bunch of subterranean gays who practised cock ...”

“... Eastman’s papers he discovered a stranger writer than he had imagined: moody, wordy, full of self-doubt, so involved with Jeanne Moreau that you wonder what happened between them. She had one other big credit, The Fortune (1975), which has passed into history as a failure, buried beneath the weight of Mike Nichols, Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, such ...”

“... philosophical and literary aspects remains Dennis Todd’s Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in 18th-Century England (1995), which is especially good at navigating all those vehement and contradictory pamphlets. Harvey’s comparatively brief study is more modest in scope, her new archival research helping to situate the episode within the local ...”

“... workers as ‘human capital’. Ultimately, the ideal non-smoker merged with the neoliberal self, who measures his health with precision, and implicitly his morality too. ‘This politics of bodily evaluation dovetailed with market-centric judgments of the body politic,’ Milov writes; the state’s performance was increasingly subject to market ...”

“... imperialism, since it monopolised the entire system of representation, but that he could express self-consciousness as an outsider. No degree of estrangement, however, was sufficient to save Conrad from interpreting the world according to the racist order of his time. Considering her own predicament, Lockwood’s narrator concludes that there is no way ...”

“... attracted me to The Daughter of Time when I was fifteen, I think it was probably this: Grant’s self-possession, his irony and savoir faire – and the hints of romantic sensibility under the bluff surface. He was so rugged, so masculine, so right. Predictably, all of that is less appealing now, and the inspector seems a more fragile and anxious ...”

“... at front lines and behind them. Such behaviour, which tarnished both the public image and the self-image of the strong and noble soldier, has not been included in personal or official histories of war.It’s also difficult to find many women. There are wonderful, rich accounts of women’s auxiliary forces, of pilots and riveters, of women’s land ...”

“... within us, the psyche constrained and persecuted. So is it all the fault of the audience? Or does self-criticism attach to the old wolf’s ‘left-over scraps and bits of energy/And bitten-off impulses’? That might describe how Hughes still says ten things (three of them brilliant) about a macaw or dove without the result adding up to a poem. Over-free ...”

“... new order of things, when it has become apparent that ‘literature is best understood not as a self-contained entity but rather as a writing practice, a particular formation within the world of discourse.’ Literature, that is, loses its ‘privileged’ status, and in so far as it exists at all does so not ‘autonomously’ but as part of a pattern of ...”

“... Oberman’s translator is easy, conversational, a trifle slipshod. Evidence about Luther’s inner self and its workings being so fragmentary, ‘all suspicions against psychohistory must be put aside.’ This is a pronouncement as bold as any of Luther’s own, but in Oberman’s handling of the method it does not float away, as it so easily can, into ...”

“... writings that poses the main problem. More disconcerting is the spirit of cheerful, even boastful self-contradiction that runs throughout them. Borrowing a handy phrase from J.A. Downie, Backscheider remarks that at times Defoe appears not so much an individual as ‘a team of writers’. Even this under-estimates his protean talents. Often he delighted in ...”

“... infuriating decade’). In her career as a reporter, Gellhorn has rarely let her anger slide into self-righteousness and, in the end, amused self-deprecation is never far away. Gellhorn left the United States for Europe in 1930, at the age of 21. By her own account, she cut a rather comic figure. ‘I intended to become a ...”

“... person was wounded and almost no damage was done.’ So much for Sharon’s claims of Israeli ‘self-restraint’ and the PLO’s ‘intolerable provocation’. During the invasion itself, Sharon asserts that Israel took ‘the greatest precautionary efforts’ to avoid civilian casualties. I have never understood why Israeli officials lied about this when ...”

“... not give a damn? Perhaps the question is: should we? Maybe it is a sign of maturity and inner self-confidence to be the first nation in Europe not to need a national anthem/flag/dress/history/myth of origins. We meant the Act of Union, even if the Scotch did not (and before anyone writes in to complain about ‘Scotch/Scots’ etc, read the entry under ...”

“... Sometimes the way in which a football team comports itself on the pitch is a question of national self-image. The Brazilian team, which qualified for the second round by winning all its first-round matches, did so amid a storm of protest at what was seen, by Brazilian pundits and spectators, as the team’s un-Brazilian approach – too cautious, too ...”