“... was told, was not so lucky, though he didn’t miss much. Obama’s most memorable lines were the self-regarding ones: ‘I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the president.’ And then came an oddly aggrandising comparison of his own humility to Lincoln’s. It was treacle from there: the student who won the science fair while she was living in a homeless ...”

“... stomach and the rest of the body, and through the stomach’s role in transforming sustenance into self, anything that went wrong in the guts could wind up disordering not just the mind but the liver, heart, gall bladder, spleen, pancreas, lungs and skin. In addition to complaints located in the stomach, the dyspeptic might suffer ...”

“... not his own. Back in Carrickfergus for the holidays, he confides to Blunt that ‘my artistic self … is mouldering here among the cabbages & well-intentioned people.’ (His realignment or reinvention of himself is accompanied by a name change: he starts to sign off as Louis, his middle name, rather than Freddie.) The MacNeice on display in these ...”

“... had been misused, and for many years the original Dusklands jacket was the only instance of arch self-display in an otherwise spotless record of authorial impersonality. In the 1980s and 1990s Coetzee’s dislike of being interviewed led to fraught encounters with journalists and much recourse to the Cape Town rumour mill. ‘A colleague who has worked with ...”

“... give way to further, vaguer figures and an infinitely extended and repeating world far beyond the self. Finally, Dorothea is brought back, with Eliot’s moral firmness, to a middle place between two repudiated ways of seeing or not seeing the world – neither just looking nor failing to look at all. Dorothea will now plunge back into selfless engagement ...”

“... Leavis and he had deliberately chosen them,’ Hilliard says. Ellis confirms this impression of a self-selecting and self-perpetuating praetorian guard of literary criticism: ‘Almost all my fellow students had been taught by men who were either former pupils of Leavis or very sympathetic to his point of view.’ It has ...”

“... advice (‘Get that grand old strain of Yankee Doodle/In your noodle’) and sailed away from self-doubt and disappointment. Every live wire goes dead without connections; and Porter latched onto his at the Ritz in Paris in January 1918 when he met the beautiful, patrician American divorcée Linda Lee Thomas at a breakfast marriage reception. Porter was ...”

“... wanted. It would appear that omniscience is one attribute of the God-like perspective; absence of self-doubt is another. Then there is a lapidary style leavened by the obiter dicta of powerful individuals, plus a tendency to reiterate a few stern commandments, which one might imagine as: ‘Thou shalt not inhibit economic growth.’ ‘Thou shalt not be ...”

“... documentation when National Insurance records were deemed insufficient, the loss of work and of self-respect, the sense of betrayal, the humiliating and dehumanising nature of it all. For Hubert Howard, who came to England when he was three and never left, ‘It has been a struggle and it’s destroyed my life.’ Paulette Wilson, who has been in England ...”

“... the regency work? When we come to consider what happened next Michael Hicks’s Richard III: The Self-Made King proves valuable. The great merit of Hicks’s academic study is that he anchors every known move in Richard’s career to the (often conflicting) sources, making it easier for readers to form their own judgments; Penn tends to iron out the ...”

“... rhythmic construction and even managed to bite the masses in the ear with it.’ Mitchell, who was self-taught – a baritone ukulele first, then the guitar from a Pete Seeger instruction record – invented everything about her music, including how to tune the guitar. ‘From the beginning of the process of writing, she’s building a canvas as well as she is ...”

“... terms with university scholars like Cranmer, a don to his fingertips. But Cromwell never lost the self-containment and self-reliance of the autodidact. He was a man of the world, a pragmatist whose preoccupations were with the possible; it just so happened that for Cromwell the scope of possibility was so much greater than ...”

“... to survive. By the second season, Winter, the algorithm – look at something outside one’s self, try to follow the thread – begins to weaken for Knausgaard. Has he exhausted the strategy? One late entry, ‘Habits’, obliquely questions the whole project. The speaker seems to fear he has become too good at the formula; he also seems to want to see ...”

“... to Charles occasionally extended into denunciations of kingship itself, but in the 1640s the self-professed detesters of monarchy never probed beyond their detestation. They did not trouble themselves with questions of constitutional architecture or wonder how to empower an alternative executive authority while preserving the liberties kingship allegedly ...”

“... that a revolutionary cannot afford such sentimentality – as proof of his excessive powers of self-control. However, might this anecdote not simply bear witness to an extreme sensitivity, and Lenin’s knowledge that it needed to be kept in check for the sake of the political struggle? In their very triviality, the details of the Bolsheviks’ daily lives ...”