“... take charge of Gwendolen after the marine disaster, is a study of George Eliot’s own clear and self-committing sympathetic involvement and the nature of the duality to which this relates. There is a pervasive unreality that contrasts with the vivid livingness and actuality of the persons, scenes and episodes that George Eliot the creative genius makes ...”

“... of itself.’ The American Century does not aim to mobilise American history against the self-justifying American myths with which it begins. Nonetheless, Harold Evans identifies a ‘direct intellectual link’ between American 19th-century Social-Darwinist gospels of the survival of the fittest and ‘Hitler and Stalin’. He is enthusiastic about ...”

“... here. What there is, however, is evidence of a much loved writer’s vexed and only partially self-aware personality. The pioneer woman is meant to be a silent type. In the 1910s Cather was a minimalist from the cornfields, a bright spot in the long shadow of Henry James. Her sentences were lucid, patient, imagistic. Like her contemporaries Sinclair Lewis ...”

“... horrified by vulgar public curiosity about his life – comes partly from the tireless project of self-presentation he undertook in his last decade: revising and collecting his fiction in the New York Edition, writing pieces of an autobiography, and burning piles of letters in an effort to guide future critics and frustrate future biographers. In recent ...”

“... signs he detected early on. He’s a lover traduced, but is he right that Britain has become a self-harming, venal little nation since it spurned his affections? That’s how it looks, to be sure, and his evidence is depressingly thorough, yet he’s confident we brought this on ourselves and hopeful, for that reason, that we can come to our senses and ...”

“... Yeshe’s remains to deny him his final religious rites. So far, the state has responded to the self-immolations by equipping police patrols with fire extinguishers and arresting anyone who survives the flames. The authorities have also extended criminal responsibility for the act to families, communities, villages and monasteries. These measures have ...”

“... with the woman he’s married to and actually loves.) Daum agonises; her husband proves a model of self-sacrifice; the marriage survives, even thrives. Others have abortions: multiple, matter-of-fact. Daum remarks on the ‘surprising’ number of pregnancies in these essays but it is fairly difficult to get through one’s fertile years as a ...”

“... giving a shit”: what you would … or … wouldn’t do in order to maintain dignity and self-respect in the face of another individual or an institution’. It was about the mystery of those middle-class people who didn’t appear to care about keeping a clean house, while for working-class people ‘maintenance of ...”

“... events both world-historical and interpersonal (perhaps at the same time) etc. This ironic self-examination puts the protagonist somewhere between @laurenoyler (the character’s description of her Twitter avatar matches the author’s profile pic) and Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces (although she’d hate to be compared to him). She ...”

“... Boxing, she points out, is as much about losing as winning. Even the best careers are brief, self-destructive and likely to end in humiliation rather than triumph. Every fight pivots on a ‘moment of visceral horror … when one boxer loses control, cannot maintain his defence, begins to waver, falter, fall back, rock with his opponent’s punches ...”

“... was taking up much of her time. These early stories, often heavily autobiographical, show her self-conscious, aspiring, fascinated with great or striking women – her male narrators, like her male pseudonyms, allowing her to write freely on female character and appearance – and hating conventional femininity. She moved on from journalism to translating ...”

“... movement of a sentence, whose grammatical structure allows us to be both inside and outside a self-contained scene, a dramatic vignette with extension in time (‘and there were moments’) and space (the reflection in the mirror above the mantelpiece). Like a painting by Renoir or Manet, this scene invites limitless speculation about the novels that ...”

“... comparable vocabularies and linked concerns whether his immediate subject is the developing self or the revolutions of society. Geoffrey Hartman has been probably the most eminent commentator on Wordsworth since the publication in 1964 of his important and influential Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787-1814. The Unremarkable Wordsworth collects 14 essays ...”

“... that motivate human beings. Liberalism is an ideal that has triumphed, and it is central to the self-identity of America. Americans can, therefore, feel confident in the future whilst they hold to the ideals of democracy and the free market. No wonder ‘Endism’ has gone down so well: it has provided a sophisticated rationale for the commonplaces of ...”