“... intolerable.’ Politically, Swinburne saw himself as an apostle of liberalism, supporting ‘self-reliance, self-dependence, self-respect’ in the nation and the individual. His anti-theism, his justification of free speech and his belief in ‘art for art’s sake’ were ...”

“... who inherited $5000, began to reappraise his relationship with his father. Years later, in a self-published biography, the son would depict Forester as a manipulative fabulist, a distant, self-centred parent, a cold-hearted philanderer, and an insecure snob who was evasive about his origins as Cecil Smith from ...”

“... is sometimes rather like Walt Whitman, democratic, containing multitudes, yet happy with solitary self-communion. In a pleasant essay called ‘A Sun-Bath – Nakedness’, Whitman remarks: ‘Here I realise the meaning of that old fellow who said he was seldom less alone than when alone. Never before did I get so close to Nature ...’ Who was the old ...”

“... that those who spoke with these voices were the betrayers of the age. Under their rhetoric lay a self-serving, self-perpetuating humbug. Just after the collapse of the Spanish Republic, at the close of the Civil War, Baldwin was invited down to the Political and Literary Society – Pol and Lit Soc – a place where we ...”

“... of the black man’s intenser and more frequent orgasms and scornful of the puritan virtues of self-containment: ‘A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a a collective failure of nerve.’ Ginsberg and Kerouac, too, tended to idolise blacks without really knowing many, and jazz was obviously the seminal influence ...”

“... no longer wish to be associated with Freud’s scientistic positivism; adepts of Kohut’s ‘self psychology’ blithely disregard the rules of analytic neutrality and abstinence in favour of an ‘empathic understanding’ of the patient; ‘narrativists’ no longer concern themselves with the ‘historical truth’ of what is said on the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... how important it was for a young man to be given a wall to paint, and acreage was suited to his self-taught and stylised virtuosity: statuesque protagonists and steep recessions influenced by early encounters with Surrealist imagery, reproductions of Italian frescoes, Hollywood cinema.His WPA peers – de Kooning, Gorky, Pollock – served time and then ...”

“... 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 ...”