“... 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 ...”

“... when he was 14, and largely pursued his own interests from then on. Precocity was key to his self-image. When he was 12, he created the Info Network, an online encyclopedia launched two years before Wikipedia, and soon after he was part of the RSS working group; for months, no one knew they were dealing with a teenager. His lack of deference helped to ...”

“... and Trump employees were quickly uncovered by Cosmopolitan and other periodicals devoted to self-image. It is estimated that two-thirds of Americans are overweight.Diplomats Seventy-five former career ambassadors and retired State Department officials, who traditionally have no party affiliations, have signed a letter calling Trump ‘ignorant’ and ...”

“... on her and waiting for her. What was I waiting for? Waiting for her to step into her self or step out of her invalid self. Waiting for her to take the voyage out of her gloom.’ Something needs to change. Hot Milk takes its epigraph from Cixous: ‘It’s up to you to break the old circuits.’ For Sofia, that ...”

“... died he did too.But there was much fun on the way. Propertius can be perky, mock-solemn, solemn, self-savaging, other-savaging, swirlingly mythological, brutally bathetic, hot, cold, drunk, vicious, silly, over-learned, stone-cold sober and dazzlingly obscure. As the elegies proceed the elegant form of Cynthia, a goddess in Book 1, largely vanishes into the ...”

“... on 27 January 1756. Leopold, Wolfgang’s father, was a composer and violinist who had recently self-published a violin primer which quickly became a standard text. His promotion to the position of deputy Kapellmeister in the court of Count Leopold Anton von Firmian, the prince-archbishop of Salzburg – he led the orchestra when the Kapellmeister was ...”

“... deeds. When one turns from the professed philosophy to the policies, what is left of Macron’s self-proclaimed ‘progressivism’? In place of ideology we find a banal pragmatism derived from a combination of neoliberalism and authoritarianism, and projected by means of impressive PR skills, on the international stage especially. From Thatcher to ...”

“... bear little resemblance to the sponsored summits of today, where female entrepreneurs disseminate self-help platitudes from hands-free microphones. ‘Women were forever summiting, endlessly climbing with ropes around the waist, wielding pitons,’ Wolitzer writes. ‘The summits were about ambitious topics, such as, recently, leadership … the foundation ...”

“... it ‘ruinously flawed’. The usual explanation for the split between O’Nolan’s all-out self-confidence and his air of anxious insecurity – a mixture of ‘fretfulness and swagger’, as Maebh Long puts it – is that it was a consequence of his failure to find a publisher for The Third Policeman. By 1941, when he turned thirty, O’Nolan had ...”

“... where prisoners could work towards an NVQ. There were fall-offs in the rates of suicide and self-harm. But the prison was still overcrowded, understaffed and unsafe. A new floor-to-ceiling window was repeatedly smashed and finally boarded up. At the beginning of the 1970s there were 800 women in prison nationwide; by 1980 there were 1500. When Greenham ...”

“... for the good of the trade, acknowledging his depravity so as to indicate their own capacity for self-regulation. Instead, they closed ranks. They understood that the reputation of the British slave trade was at stake, that it would be difficult to separate the charges against Kimber from the larger allegations the abolitionists had made against the ...”

“... heard of a “Bo-da” meeting, nobody ever heard of suicide hotlines, nobody ever heard of any self-help programme – wallowing in self-pity with only a touch of stylish irony was the only idea. And I loved it for its fearless wrongness.’That was the year of her accident. Babitz refused to address her brush with ...”

“... they made a happy threesome, with Meredith posing for a picture of the poet Chatterton, dead after self-poisoning. Judging by Wallis’s amiable teddy-bearish persona in his letters (he lived into old age, became a significant collector of Italian and Islamic ceramics and adored his son, Felix), we might wager it was the dissatisfied wife who made the first ...”