“... then. Phew.’ Phew, and indeed, gosh. He’s less passive about other things. Except for sex, the self-conscious rock and roll wild man is always ready to make his mark. When Robert Stigwood failed to pay up after a series of concerts, he got trapped on a staircase and kneed by Keith 16 times, one for each grand owed. Not that Stigwood apologised (‘Maybe I ...”

“... Bible-reading and public sermonising, created a new ethos of conscience and consciousness, of self-scrutiny and inwardness. Such an ideological climate breeds tragedy. It is not for nothing that both Faustus and Hamlet studied at the University of Wittenberg, a Lutheran town. But there is a further historical sense in which Shakespeare was the child of ...”

“... them. From its first meeting in March 1920 the Memoir Club was on the lookout for incidental self-revelation. On that occasion there were seven speakers. It was ‘highly interesting’, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, adding: ‘Lord knows what I didn’t read into their reading.’ Supposedly a secret society, it largely remained so until after the ...”

“... In 1965, Willeford finally settled down. He took a teaching job, published a couple more books, self-published a collection of his poetry entitled Poontang and Other Stories – sex and death mostly. He saw Monte Hellman direct the movie of Cockfighter, got divorced again, appeared as a bartender in Thunder and Lightning (like Cockfighter, it was produced ...”

“... revealing how, in the magic spectacle of London literary life, he is always able to pull his own self out of the hat. ‘Nikos was eager to show me something he had received from Stephen Spender, in Washington, which is on his desk in the sitting room. “Look,” he said, “a reproduction of Andrea del Castagno’s The Youthful David.” He said he was not ...”

“... personal freedom and the lightness of burden that was the precious marker of their lonely path to self-discovery. The Corrections synthesised the two: a woman and her brothers strike out for validation, seemingly unbound, only to find the containing context of family, embodied in their Midwestern parents, always there to meet them, fencing them in with guilt ...”

“... Dardanelles campaign were unlooked for, at least by the British. The first was a boost in national self-confidence for the Turks, who took great pride in being the first, so they thought, to beat the invincible Royal Navy. They were also surprised and encouraged by the Europeans’ mistakes. ‘These British are either really stupid or unprepared,’ a Turkish ...”

“... ignored. But as the old state clings on, a sort of parallel, civil-society government has been self-organising. It feeds and equips the army, provides legal and social services to internally displaced refugees, brings medical aid to those who are stuck in war zones both on the Ukrainan and the rebel-held side. For all the bad news there appears to be some ...”

“... was part of the wider black freedom struggle, as well as an extension of an American philosophy of self-reliance and artistic emancipation that runs from Emerson to Whitman to Allen Ginsberg. Coleman claimed that freedom as his birthright; it echoed in his music’s sense of space, the way it moved between country and city, land and sky. As Cecil Taylor told ...”

“... spoilt beyond redemption. The second son, the Duke of York who became the reluctant king, was the self-effacing naval officer hampered by an acute stammer. Of the younger two, Gloucester was a solid military man and Kent another playboy. More promiscuous than his elder brother, he was the good time who was had by all, including, it was said, Noël Coward and ...”

“... memoirs, but no less rigorous, and in some respects probably even more so, since the diaries were self-censored within a Stalinist frame of reference, while the memoirs emerged in the milder climate of the Thaw. Gorodetsky compares Maisky’s diaries to Pepys’s in their ‘astute observation of the British political and social scene, spiced with anecdotes ...”

“... the explanation was thought to be worth discussing but the fact of the matter was taken as self-evident. One of the winning essays pointed to the essential clarity of French sentence structure: ‘That which is not clear is not French; that which is not clear is still English’ – or some other mess of a language. Among the claimants to priority in ...”

“... could absorb and transform voices from his own and from the literary past. But he combined that self-aggrandisement with a powerful dose of guilt. The imperial poets Dante and Virgil were unsettling doubles for a poet who had lived through the Troubles, and had seen friends and family killed by imperial rule. The dead cousin Colum McCartney who appears to ...”

“... Taylor puts it in his new biography, Proust’s ‘vitality’ was ‘checkmated by the excess of self-seeing’; knowing these people – knowing anyone – ended in catastrophic disappointment. Only a new lyricism of self-doubt could do justice to his bafflement at himself and what he wanted; his long sentences defer the ...”

“... 1910, he set out to edit a selection of William’s letters only to end up producing a remarkable self-portrait. Though he had intended to preface the letters with a short history of their family, recollection soon faltered. Little more than a year separated the two oldest James children, but as far as Henry could remember, William had been ‘always round ...”