“... dominant themes of both his journal and his letters to Elsie is the urge to escape the ‘terrible self-contemplation’ to which he is prone, especially at weekends, in the city; and to recover through contact with nature a sense of his physical being. ‘I doubt,’ he writes of an outing in the autumn of 1902,if there is any keener delight in the world ...”

“... Series (1905). The use of these descriptive lines in ‘Gerontion’, in many ways an Eliot self-portrait, suggests that indeed Eliot identified with Fitzgerald in spite of his appearance in the Ellis book. But surely only a homophobic bigot would have refrained from ‘pointing out his passion’ for a poet he admired on account of his appearance in ...”

“... knocking off early, acts of petty theft and sabotage – became paradigmatic examples of the ‘self-valorisation’ of the working class. At first, these actions were part of a strategy for effecting revolutionary change, not (as in anarchism) an attempt to realise a new social ideal. But they soon became ends in themselves, and throughout the 1980s ...”

“... masterfully disorienting 1928 sequence The Descent of Winter, written on shipboard, and focused on self-doubt in middle age: There are no perfect waves – Your writings are a sea full of misspellings and faulty sentences. Level. Troubled . . . This is the sadness of the sea – waves like words, all broken – a sameness of lifting and falling mood. A 1944 ...”

“... began buying and selling rare books and fine editions, and made plans to become a publisher. To be self-taught in a country as stiflingly curricular as France was up to a point a blessing: Malraux read more freely and thought more expansively than he might have done had he stayed on at school. Expansiveness can go too far, however, and with Malraux it ...”

“... a French spy. And so Johnston’s exciting subtitle has had to go and he has added a new, somewhat self-righteous preface to his revised version of the book. Here he excuses his description of Wordsworth as a ‘spy’ as the ‘harmless’ consequence of an honourable mission: ‘my large task of trying to shift the ponderous weight of Wordsworth’s ...”

“... and isn’t helped by his charmless, bloodless prose style, laced as it is with briskly self-satisfied flourishes which his opponents saw as insufferable arrogance. An ardent propagandist for so-called Basic English, a project which reduced the language to a mere 850 words, Richards was also a precursor of today’s global industry of ...”

“... facial gymnastics, which in Moto were so pointless, are here used to show the murderer’s divided self. Lang – a sadistic director – pushed Lorre to his limits on set, forcing him repeatedly to redo a scene where he is kicked in the shins until he couldn’t walk for three days. As Beckert breathlessly laments the impossibility of escaping ‘from ...”

“... The book also spread the word autism he had made up a little earlier, to indicate the total self-absorption of some of his patients. His examples were pretty bizarre, and make you think that the bourgeoisie of those days were even nuttier than we can imagine. The noun was used regularly, if not frequently, in German-language (including what we would now ...”

“... spent in Bangalore immersed in Gibbon and Macaulay formed his mind and shaped his style; the self-promoting war journalism made his name, boosted his bank balance and launched him into Parliament. Rather surprisingly for a leading military historian, Keegan does not really develop the martial theme he sets out so vividly early on. Yet it mattered ...”

“... a Lawrentian sense that men and women live in different worlds; John displays, too, the paralysing self-consciousness that in Lawrence and elsewhere afflicts men who cannot be masculine. Fighting insomnia, John contemplates ‘some necessity he never got the hang of, or the feel of, the place of. One wants to ask a simple question, do I do it right, is it ...”

“... As an observer of the man, the psychic material Richardson has to account for includes an entirely self-willed craving for the bland, comme il faut anaesthesia of that marriage. The Picasso he describes spends much of his time revering the bourgeoisie in all its discreet charm and with all its suave complacency, and the days when he provides them with ...”

“... he got on famously with Honecker and an understanding grew between them that Ulbricht’s rigid self-certainty had become a liability. Ulbricht was finally evicted in 1971, but not before his prime minister, Willi Stoph, had met Brandt twice, at Erfurt (East) and Kassel (West), without first getting Soviet approval. A few years later, Brezhnev plunged the ...”

“... between 1983 and 1985 put an end to such plans. Festac had tried to inculcate a belief in African self-reliance, but the Ethiopian famine ushered in an era of celebrity-driven humanitarianism on the continent and the association of Africa with ‘crisis’.After Nance returned to New York, she suggested the idea of a photobook about Festac to several ...”

“... care or the economic prospects of younger generations – was too often overlooked, because its self-appointed spokespersons tended to be metropolitan columnists such as Johnson.) But the question of the nation – of what, literally, we and our descendants are born into – is never exhausted by the conceits and prejudices of nationalism. That question ...”