“... as he marries Blackwood. These haunted poems are aspects of what he calls ‘my conscious smile of self-incrimination’.Lowell​ emerges from his poems and letters as both thoughtless and tortured, entitled and damaged. Hardwick’s letters are more direct, her rage – and her interest in protecting her daughter – coming to the fore. But she is also ...”

“... a book, it was also a political ‘project’, with a manifesto written by members of the CPGB’s self-consciously forward-looking Eurocommunist wing. ‘The malaise of the left is that the old is dying but the new cannot yet be born,’ the book ended, quoting from the New Times manifesto. ‘We are searching for a new political language. We can imagine it ...”

“... in a fit of drunken despair, for example – as credible and powerful as the smaller pieces of self-delusion and social comedy. ‘It is also a book about a woman,’ Moore wrote to his publisher, ‘presenting certain problems of living peculiar to women. I wrote it with all the sympathy and understanding that I am capable of.’ Moore clearly knew that ...”

“... suddenness and severity’ it should have some ‘chastening influence … on the self-confidence of mankind’, and Henry Adams likened the news to the foundering of the Republican Party: ‘the sum and triumph of civilisation … our greatest achievement sinks at a touch … Nature jeers at us for our folly.’ The sinking of the Titanic ...”

“... metre he found congenial for his personal poems he looks back with calm irony at his old fiery self: I was a fire-breathing Catholic C.O., and made my manic statement, telling off the state and president, and then sat waiting sentence in the bull pen beside a Negro boy with curlicues of marijuana in his hair. Randall Jarrell’s five-line poem ‘The ...”

“... with anyone … This attitude lasted six or seven months.’ Once home, he began to make self-portraits in pencil, which left him ‘wholly dissatisfied’. He continued to be supported by his father until he was 27. No one wanted him to become an artist, and there was no contemporary art or artist he admired whose work he saw in the city’s ...”

“... one? There are many ways in which the imagination creates and imparts knowledge. Is this claim self-evident, or just untrue – untrue because the imagination, whatever its wonders and virtues, doesn’t deal in knowledge in any but the weakest, least demanding sense? There are all kinds of good things which are not knowledge, and we should not betray them ...”

“... and 20th centuries.* While a British-educated middle class emerged in India and began to aspire to self-rule, Nepal remained a country of peasants, nomads and traders, controlled by a few clans and families. Previously dependent on China, its high-caste Hindu ruling class courted the British as they expanded across India in the 19th century. As in the ...”

“... on nature had given way to an uneasy hush, which was then followed by a frenzy of alarms and self-recriminations as Homo sapiens, the bad steward, ran riot through the estate. In wealthier parts of the world, the perils of Nature (and work) are no longer what they were, so it’s difficult to grasp that in earlier readings of Moby-Dick, the Nantucket ...”

“... nation-state had started to turn itself into something else. It was now ready to abandon as self-defeating the attempt to provide for the welfare of all its citizens, and instead sought to found its legitimacy on its ability to maximise their opportunities, and to offer them the basic security within which to make those opportunities count. It was ...”

“... by Nancy Crampton on the jacket of his new novel, Everyman, is as stern and ungiving as a self-portrait by Rembrandt. 30 May, Yorkshire. Not one in fifty people knows how to restore or convert a house. A familiar fault round here is to strip off the stucco to reveal the supposed beauty of the stonework, which is often not beautiful at all and ...”

“... frivolous to be on the golf course when he was sending soldiers into battle. Obama was not so self-denying. Ben Rhodes describes what happened when news came through in August 2014 that the journalist Jim Foley had been beheaded by Isis. Video footage of this ghastly event arrived while Obama was holidaying on Martha’s Vineyard. He wrestled with how to ...”

“... was a sort of carpaccio of the middle and lower parts of my torso, a slice of the inside of the self. While I saw some well-known organs clearly, the cancer as it appeared on the screen seemed nothing more than a smudge, a few faint grains. If the doctor had not pointed them out to me, I would have given myself a clean bill of health and gone to play ...”

“... begin a retreat from empire in his effort to put ‘America first’. With a book-length flurry of self-ennoblement, The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left the Right (2018), Boot gave up on the Republican Party and discovered white male privilege – as well as the fact that he was a beneficiary of it. He was preparing for his new political identity as a ...”

“... An old-school jazz fan like Sinatra, he worshipped Louis Armstrong and closely studied Satchmo’s self-presentation and singular way with a tune. Crosby’s delivery was ‘cool’ in a way that was entirely new to the mainstream, studded with jazz tics such as unexpected pauses and slurred or flattened notes. His understanding of microphone technique meant ...”