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“... 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 ...”

“... feminist criticism has degenerated since its harmonious beginnings in the mid-1970s, becoming a self-enclosed hive of accusations and counter-accusations. I believe her. It sounds awful. Why keep going to those conferences, listening to those papers that attack or ignore you? Why cling to the fantasy of a lost concord? It is hard for the fight against ...”

“... syndrome (‘spectral pall’) that can readily be diagnosed in many other cases. And Healey? Self-evidently a man of catholic literary tastes, formed and sustained by a lifetime of interstitial reading amid busy days and nights, he was formidably equipped to rise to the challenge of authorship. His grand strategy was brilliantly simple: to write his own ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bad to worse. I was 24, I had no idea how to live in the world, let alone write about it; and the self who was supposed to produce some kind of narrative by the end of the year seemed increasingly fugitive and fragmented. The whole business of being Irish in England seemed to me old-fashioned and, in tiny ways, ghastly. People thought I was amusing, in an ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... those that warrant none, is actually a bit of a relief played against Fonda’s beatific and self-righteous Wyatt (think Earp), a.k.a. Captain America. But Billy’s meanness and scariness are startling. It’s possible to argue that it’s what redeems the otherwise self-indulgent film. Billy and Wyatt were never ...”

“... Kent State massacre; anti-war protesters battled construction workers in the streets of New York; self-proclaimed political prisoners attempted bloody escapes; middle-class students planted bombs and robbed banks. In August that year, Richard Nixon took a break from a four-day conference on crime control to address reporters. His subject was the spell that ...”

“... who they are and how they are to live? Nussbaum is in effect saying to such feminists that the self-silencing brought on by their relativistic worries is no more justified than the silence imposed on feminist voices by societal misogyny or pig-headed colleagues. Having found our voices, we should not muffle or mute them in the name of an ...”

“... time, recognise a value of truth which is not just that – for instance, when we recognise that self-deceit is in itself not the best of states. Again, our ideas of truthfulness are under a great deal of strain at present. On the one hand, we tend to be pervasively suspicious, anxious not to be fooled, eager to see through appearances to the real motives ...”

“... both he and his nation were pliant to circumstance. Diaries tend to be written either by comically self-important Mr Toads or by Pooters – those who need to record their daily successes and triumphs over their rivals in order to be sure that they have actually got to where they hope they have got to. Pepys has traces of both Toad and Pooter, but he also ...”

“... the Vietnam War, In Pharaoh’s Army: ‘Isn’t there, in the very act of confession, an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it?’ Jonathan Franzen’s memoir, The Discomfort Zone, is an object lesson in the management of such obscenity. The book begins with a loss. After lengthy treatment for colon ...”