“... four decades. Has this poet been too humble? Or has he been too proud? Is he to be admired for self-effacement or chastised for self-absorption? Over the years, Thomas has asked himself such questions many times, and his replies have been as non-definite as ours. According to Thomas’s eccentric but industrious ...”

“... suggests, of a marriage between Wilde and Tolstoy, a writer he revered. He was a compulsive self-publicist, but it was never without a generous dash of self-irony. ‘I find myself while still in middle life,’ he observed, ‘almost as legendary a person as the Flying Dutchman.’ This volume, rich in photos and ...”

“... nine or ten years old. And Isherwood was not the only one to be impressed by little Wystan’s ‘self-assurance’, his ‘clinical detachment’, his ‘air of authority’. Among his school-fellows, says Isherwood, he had the ‘status of a kind of witch-doctor’.This talk of clinics and doctors mainly had to do with Auden’s precocious know-how about ...”

“... support life. The Manx naturalist Edward Forbes coined the word ‘azoic’ to describe this self-evidently lifeless zone. By the 1870s he and other oceanographers were eating their words as improved sampling technology retrieved abundant evidence that, in cheerful defiance of human preconceptions, even the deepest abyss was teeming with life. A ...”

“... international law, or have a habit of complying with it . . . but simply that states act out of self-interest.’ This assumes that states can and do act rationally, and that in exercising rational choices the values they apply are consistent with those of Goldsmith and Posner. Practice suggests otherwise. The authors’ claim is difficult to sustain even ...”

“... Marathi and then Hindu identity, changed Bombay seemingly for good, taking away its cosmopolitan self-image. It was at this time that the ‘maximum city’ – burgeoning, and in the process pulling down the barriers that had kept the middle-class employee and the entrepreneur on the make, governance and criminality, politics and religion, in distinct ...”

“... on the other hand I don’t. There are so many factors engaging our attention! Even as present self and poem give up pride of place to an earlier self and an earlier poem, neither self nor poem seems certain: And this is not as good a poem as The Circus And I wonder if any good will ...”

“... in a review of author and book together. What made Our Age so arresting was its combination of self-promotion and self-flagellation, and Annan’s wistful reflections on the failures, as well as the successes, of his own generation. Put simply, he could scarcely conceal his pride in what he and his peers had achieved ...”

“... catalogue of misery and violence. If this was empathy it was subordinate to a powerful overflow of self-pity, and present when I was at my most incapable. So one shouldn’t sentimentalise it: empathy that derives from the chronic impotence of depression doesn’t add up to much. Later, when I’d more or less recovered, I was, like most ...”

“... dream was dreamed in unforgotten days’ only to flee in anguish from the spectre of her youthful self: ‘I am shamed/Before that little ghost with eager eyes.’ There appear to have been several reasons for her decision to kill herself – not the least of which, as Beckman sensibly suggests, was a biochemical tendency to depression. But it can also seem ...”

“... The great experimental chemist of the previous generation, Joseph Priestley, had believed it self-evident that the progress of reason and science would lead to a general reformation of religion and politics: ‘The English hierarchy (if there be anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble even at an air pump, or an electrical ...”

“... incongruous elegance. For this reason he is loathed. Academics hate him because he is not self-indulgent.’ Amis – who produced ‘the finest fiction … of the era’ – is picked on for similarly self-serving reasons: ‘The only comic mode now granted respect by the literati is the kind of surreal speculation ...”

“... class he came from, perhaps because of his somewhat Rousseauian early upbringing (all that self-reliance), his lack of a public school education and his family links with the commercial world. He was a dogmatic free marketeer, a self-styled ‘anti-Jingo’ and an enthusiast for European nationalisms. He flirted with ...”

“... ancestors; by the end, du Maurier/ Ibbetson’s mother has become his daughter and his childhood self, his own lovely grandchild. Here was a storehouse of themes, to be raided by the real descendant throughout her life, from the ancestral time-travel of The House on the Strand to the spiritualist element in The Scapegoat or Don’t Look Now; from nostalgia ...”

“... an alarming concentration of power – there was nothing innocent about the joke. Walpole’s self-promotion was a standard target, but Fielding’s sly participle gave a new twist to the usual complaint, and suggests how unlike a ministering angel an exponent of prime ministering might be. Yet there was also something distinctly ...”