“... office had to be less than totally ruthless. The Gorbachev years had made the Russian people more self-confident and less afraid. They had also seen the beginning of the media age, with TV cameras and reporters coming and going almost as they pleased. So when Yeltsin looked out of his window in the White House and saw all those post-Soviet people climbing up ...”

“... treating her? Or should we keep her alive as long as possible, respecting the life of her present self such as it is, basking in the sunshine, smiling at anyone who enters her field of vision? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the latter choice would be a serious harm to Margo, or at least to the Margo who executed the document. By not letting her ...”

“... curiously uncertain, alternating between major and brutal police action and mere containment. The self-constituted body of community leaders called the Committee of Ten, which eventually emerged to conduct negotiations, was arrested, then released and allowed to function. The action in Soweto spread to townships in other parts of the country, particularly in ...”

“... of a poem. ‘These were strange requests, coming from someone who had made contemporary poets self-conscious about their crudities, afraid to rhyme “bone” with “stone”, or to go umpty-umpty-um. Marianne was doing her best, one saw, to go umpty-umpty-um when she sensed that La Fontaine had gone that way, but it seemed to be almost – I use the ...”

“... work under the new industrialism, and is balanced by the critical yet sympathetic discussion of ‘Self-Help and Respectability’ which follows. He respects the experience of working men who became Methodists: ‘the message that comes through innumerable accounts of the great central Methodist experience of conversion is one of joy and hope.’ To some ...”

“... a study that uses both female writers and characters to explore the tensions between a woman’s self-realisation and her fulfilment through love. Like George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett seems to have been a happy exception to Blake’s general rule – having won fame as an artist and the devoted support of a lover as well. Yet the conflicts that both women ...”

“... Fitzgerald makes a good case for seeing her as two people: as Miss Lotti, the parasol-carrying, self-effacing homebody, who broke with Harland because Oscar Wilde’s trial besmirched the Yellow Book’s reputation, and as Charlotte Mew, the poet and headbanger, who fell for Harland’s assistant Ella d’Arcy, and pursued her to Paris. For two months in ...”

“... coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing but his own naked self to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully – and losing it – just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely too, or else ...”

“... was writing, and indeed living, à rebours, under the threat of insanity and in the dark thrill of self-inflicted frustration. The split could not be concealed indefinitely, and by the 1920s her appearance had altered, and shocked. ‘Her wind-blown gray hair, her startled gray eyes, her thin white face, belonged to a reluctant visitor from another ...”

“... had done a classic job. It was a time when he slept badly, was nervous and irritable. His self-confidence was shaken. Should he try to make a mark in London literary circles? No, he detested the log-rolling and backbiting. Should he become more of a courtier and build on his ode sung at the Coronation of Edward VII (or rather, as he observed, not ...”

“... between a radical critique of the spurious ‘progressiveness’ of the cult of spontaneity and self-expression in literature teaching, and a surely exaggerated fear that the entire British literary tradition is so savagely and unfailingly repressive in its political outlook that radical intellectuals might do best to shield the working classes from any ...”

“... for him, largely because it has abandoned its appeal to popular recognition in favour of a kind of self-sealing historicism. But he cannot quite keep his categories watertight. His love of Larkin’s poetry might seem, along with his admiration of Betjeman’s, to fit in with his notion of duty to the common reader, and his successful career as both television ...”

“... which thread the book together, it is difficult in the end not to feel that Lelyveld, for all his self-effacement, emerges as the hero of his own book. Inevitably, his own liberal prejudices shine through, so that, for all his gentle humanity, most of the whites interviewed come across as bigots, fools or monsters. And indeed many of them are just that. But ...”

“... When it goes awry, when people lose and/or reject all positive referents in the real world for the self inside, we call them delusional, psychotic, mad. In order to count as sane, you don’t necessarily have to conform to the norms of the world, but you do have to be nonconformist in a generally acceptable way. One of the basic beliefs we all have, according ...”

“... attitude to a novel-themed museum was one of mistrust. I place a high importance on the material self-reliance of a printed page. Kafka refused to put a picture of an insect on the cover of Metamorphosis. That’s what it is to believe in literature.And yet, a year and a half later, I was wandering the twisted streets of Cihangir and Çukurcuma, looking for ...”