“... 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 ...”

“... means productions, but he could be read as proposing also the need for experimental, i.e. self-conscious and ironic and non-literal, interpretations] are justified today; only what injures the Wagner orthodoxy is true. The defenders of the grail shouldn’t get so worked up about it; Wagner’s precise instructions exist and will continue to be handed ...”

“... mini-dynasties of similar eminence. The bloodline is as vital as the Windsors’. A bereavement of self-knowledge is also useful. They are hardly aware of their ephemerality till everything turns to dust. That’s a relief the Firm can’t share – even in Californian exile they will never escape the fate they were born to. Dramatic irony is the common humour ...”

“... Voldemort hit him when he was still a baby, and would have killed him but for his mother’s self-sacrificial intervention; the scar functions, like the mark of Cain, to set Harry apart. (The evil upper-form boy Malfoy calls him ‘Scarhead’.)The Family Romance haunts the story of the ugly duckling, raised among scornful ducks until he discovers that ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... by herself and at her own pace. Perhaps because her huge early success precluded the need for self-promotion, she has, somewhat miraculously for a still youngish writer, never participated in the social media circus. The result is that she tends to arrive at positions that can surprise us, challenging received wisdom without ever lapsing into automatic ...”

“... years on the throne, the queen had, according to Batten, committed treason against herself – a self-inflicted lèse-majesté. In another age, the Tower of London would be dusting down Thomas More’s old cell for him. But it would be unfair to dismiss Batten as a know-nothing stirrer, though often his behaviour does seem to fit that description: calling ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a view of the boulevards. The painting is a record of friendship, of shared endeavour, mutualised self-belief. A few months later Bazille, who had enlisted as a Zouave when the war began, was killed in one of the several futile battles fought in the hope of breaking the Paris siege. He was 28. Renoir was conscripted and sent to the Pyrenees, where he got ...”

“... but instead to guarantee the most stable currency values for international investors. Numerous self-imposed fiscal ‘rules’ and ‘pacts’ were introduced by governments during this period, all aimed at reassuring the financial markets that politicians remained conscious they were under supervision.In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis of ...”

“... biracial democracy that followed the Civil War – was a time of misgovernment and corruption; the self-styled Redeemers, who rescued the South from the supposed horrors of ‘Negro rule’ by overthrowing Reconstruction, were the inheritors of the values of the Old South; a New South was emerging and with it the promise of widespread prosperity. This dogma ...”