“... inner space was barren and haunted. The marvellous thing is that the barrenness brought him not to self-denial or self-hatred but rather to a kind of tense curiosity about every Jewish phenomenon, especially the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Yiddish language, the Yiddish theatre, Hasidism, Zionism and even the idea of moving ...”

“... of relativism, for the same has been and will continue to be true of all historic proclamations of self-evident and universal truths. After all, the two most self-evident truths of life on this planet are that the earth is flat and that the sun goes round it. The truth that all men are created equal was far from ...”

“... he understands are used by street gangs in Los Angeles.] Also due in March is a memoir called Self Abuse by Jonathan Self. Whether or not he may have any famous relatives is hinted at in the John Murray catalogue, which tells us that Self’s father, ‘Professor ...”

“... in German.’ He worked with the utter absorption that would always mark his greatest periods of self-discovery, and not for the first time Dorothy worried that the strain of making verses was making him ill. Wordsworth was writing with troubled urgency, as though his poems were a necessary psychological bulwark: ‘As I have had no books I have been obliged ...”

“... a year, as hope of relaunching his invasion of Venezuela dwindled and with it his credibility and self-respect. Raleigh and Miranda: ‘obsessed men, well past their prime, each with his own vision of the New World, each at what should have been a moment of fulfilment, but really near the end of things, in the Gulf of Desolation’. Raleigh and Miranda are ...”

“... of the Common Programme of the Left, in 1972, as the crucial moment at which a whole range of self-identified leftists, from older progressistes to anti-Soviet gauchistes, suddenly begin to wonder, at the prospect of an electoral victory finally bringing the Communist Party to power, whether that was really what they had in mind after all. I also take the ...”

“... of egotism, and almost all religious belief, considered as a sociological phenomenon, is about self. This connects to a phenomenon that at first glance seems curious. If we take the term ‘morally worse’ as purely descriptive, denoting people whose characters generally appear to be morally worse than average, and if we restrict our attention to those ...”

“... to rule themselves.’ By the end of the year, postcolonial states had enshrined the right to self-determination in UN Resolution 1514. Britain abstained. The following year, in the face of an emerging international consensus on racial equality and self-determination led by former Asian and African colonies, South ...”

“... shorter write-up. At times she played along. She became a much sought-after speaker, known for her self-ironising and performative talks, which did nothing to undermine her image as a sexy and somewhat ditzy party girl. But critics mistook the persona for the writer, and paid little attention to her actual texts. The reception of her 1992 novel Fransk åpning ...”

“... him, according to Callow, ‘much of what he knows aesthetically about sound’. That Welles was a self-conscious tyrant was crucial to his achievement. It may also explain his ambivalence towards acolytes and admirers, what Thomson calls his ‘dread of the thing most desired’. ‘I’m a king actor,’ Welles admitted in a late interview, ‘maybe a bad ...”

“... considering what kind of cultural authority this type of writing can lay claim to these days. It self-consciously repudiates the credentials of academic scholarship; it disparages the narrow technical expertise of the policy wonk; it cannot rest on the standing of achievement as a politician or novelist. In other words, it has nothing to declare but its ...”

“... cancel the barge as it approaches the corner of avenues. Well, we sweated that out. It amounts to self-importance. Whether the sea is a vernacular one only heroes can describe. Why don’t you pluck me one? Seems they all rushed to the other side of the deck, causing alarm. Wind shrivelled the rags that were left. Hold on a minute, we’ll get you aloft. No ...”

“... to finally  make it  will mean    entering an unbearably vulnerable self    where i do some version of complete love  complete  forgiveness  complete   acceptance complete difference      but properly    not only touching the human bits    but touching everything       fish fumble and  sing ...”

“... an animal body from a hat or a hosepipe is the fact that it is signifying, communicative, self-transformative stuff, in contrast to the meaninglessly dumb matter of so much contemporary materialism. It is, in Turner’s phrase, ‘matter articulate’. Modern-day materialists, Turner complains, talk about matter, but unlike Thomas they cannot hear ...”

“... boy from an undocumented Salvadorean immigrant family, goes out with a glamorous and maddeningly self-sufficient artist, and prepares for two separate once-in-a-generation storms to hit the city. But there’s another kind of plot running through 10:04: the story of how Ben set out to write one version of his novel and then scrapped his plan and came to ...”