“... The New Negro: ‘In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is – or promises to be – a race capital ... Without pretence to their political significance, Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia.’What Locke ...”

“... anguish in, say, Mozart’s C minor and D minor piano concertos, or the quiet, although triumphal, self-satisfaction in The Creation (Haydn showing himself to be in direct contact with natural generation as opposed to the requirements of his patron): what if those works were also, internally, an expression of impatient ...”

“... of interest in other people, or even in his own vision and imagination. She shows him devoid of self-knowledge and insight, of any political sense and of either a romantic or realist ideology. Muybridge may not have been a completely dedicated imaginative artist, but he wasn’t just a technical inventor aiming simply to conquer movement with the ...”

“... talent and the authenticity merchants who sell him, of his contempt for his audience and the self-contempt that grows with his facility at pleasing the people. A Face in the Crowd comes from 1957: a post-McCarthy production, in which the ‘sponsors’ of Lonesome Rhodes (Andy Griffith in the performance of his life) could be shown as creators and ...”

“... choose among, they would need to be ‘educated for choice’. If they didn’t make the necessary self-adjustments, Americans would continue to suffer from their cultural contradictions. How otherwise could wild college life be reconciled with the humdrum career that followed? The answer, Mead believed, was for people to design a personal culture. Twenty ...”

“... is forging currency. The Dittisham episode is the strongest in the novel and its visionary self-sufficiency suggests that it arose in Carey’s imagination separately from the rest of the book. I fancy Carey gives us a clue to the genesis of this material, in the form of a very specific and well-researched reference to an early 19th-century ...”

“... first undetectably, it would infect the North Korean body politic with the virus of information, self-consciousness and, eventually, rebellion. The dungeon in which North Koreans languish is more impenetrable than the Iron Curtain ever was, and Choco Pies alone will never have the allure of Levis and Audis. But seeds have germinated at Kaesong which could ...”

“... to snare the elusive ‘non-specialist reader’. There is clearly something deliberate, even self-indulgent, about the digressive miscellaneousness of the enterprise, something again in which the publisher appears to have colluded with the author. Take the appearances of one John Morgan Richards. On page 65 we are introduced to him as an ...”

“... alone’ – he should not be excited by his use of violence. National security demands a monkish self-denial, where officials forego the comforts of conscience and the pleasures of impulse in order to inflict when necessary the most brutal force and abstain from or abandon that force whenever it becomes counter-productive. It’s an ethos that bears all the ...”

“... hare and kill it: there’s no escape, the track is encased by walls. The hare’s typical act of self-defence, to turn back on itself so dramatically that it throws off its pursuers, marvelled at by hunters for centuries, isn’t available: the locomotive blocks its path. ‘Each outcry of the hunted hare/A fibre from the brain does tear,’ Blake said, but ...”

“... and a certain kind of actor, heroes of moral struggle face difficulties as they age. Principled self-sacrifice is tough to sustain over a lifetime, and those who spend years on a pedestal frequently end up toppling into the mud. Assassination tends to preserve reputations (Martin Luther King, Chico Mendes). Elected office can put the seal on a career or ...”

“... a deceitful individual who blurs the distinction between the political and the economic out of self-interest. It stigmatises in foreigners precisely those features considered desirable in citizens: the desire to work, the will to self-improvement, and the willingness to invest one’s own human capital where it will ...”

“... supplies to frontline troops. Chekh describes them variously as noble and infuriating, kind and self-serving, materially generous but emotionally needy. They have passive-aggressive snits if you deny them a selfie or ‘don’t post a photo of a box of baked goods on Facebook’. Everything decent in Chekh’s bunker, apart from the chainsaw to cut wood for ...”

“... But the poetry took shape as a drama of desire, nagged by a suspicion that one can’t be a self by oneself. For every Auden poem that dares to hope the soul may ‘be weaned at last to independent delight’, there is a voice in the wings whispering something not unlike what Auden said of Oscar Wilde – ‘Alone, he does not know who he is.’ The ...”

“... no personal information, not even a gender. This is, if not professional suicide, then a form of self-harm. On rare occasions invisibility can become part of an author’s mystique, whether that invisibility is absolute (B. Traven), relative (Thomas Pynchon) or precarious (Elena Ferrante), but there has to be a readership in place first. These days ...”