“... overreaching and distracting in the appreciation of the arts. The ‘principle’ of art being ‘self-reflective’, i.e. too much about itself, Ricks writes, ‘like all others, has always been tempted to escalate its claims, to make itself the one thing necessary, as if art’s own nature were the only thing with which art were ever occupied’. True ...”

“... in hiding. After Rivas Mira’s departure, Villalobos took charge. The ERP issued an official ‘self-criticism’, which according to Galeas was written by Villalobos. In tortured, dogmatic prose, it blamed the ERP’s troubles on the organisation’s ‘revolutionary immaturity’ and on the ‘bourgeois tendencies sustained’ by Rivas Mira’s ...”

“... countries’, it seems, because they represent a collective disregard for the country’s better self. What torture, rendition and indefinite detention without trial desecrate, in other words, is not the constitution as ordinarily conceived but the constitution as embodying the moral innocence that Americans supposedly once enjoyed. That an irreverent critic ...”

“... A Grief Observed, published pseudonymously, tracked the stages of his bereavement, from self-pity, through anger (God must be a ‘Cosmic Sadist’) to Christian solace and hope. Its fragmentary form is suggestive of spontaneity, but the didactic end – as always with Lewis – is never in doubt. For all their searching conversations, Lewis and ...”

“... polishing, and then presenting the results in alphabetical order. This may qualify as a piece of self-disciplined formal choosing (ascèse is the word used), but it isn’t a constraint in the Oulipo sense, lacking (as does Sphinx) the necessary element of arbitrariness. It’s true that Oulipo is supportive rather than prescriptive, but if it amounts to a ...”

“... to Europe’s revolutions; genuine political reform required a much more mundane form of national self-appraisal. Yet just as he was turning his back on the radiant, noble Greeks of Winckelmann and Hölderlin, Heine saw a new side of them: he tried to imagine how the pagan gods had coped with the victory of Christ. In his essay ‘The Gods in ...”

“... in seeing Zhukov as a great military man, a person of culture who never abandoned the project of self-education and valued education in others; who was, above all, Russian. He was ‘completely Russian by nature’, his daughter Era says, ‘loved everything Russian: land and people, music and arts, customs and food’. Maria, who embraced religion in the ...”

“... an end to censorship. The regimes are long gone, and so too are those noble dreams of workers’ self-management. (Who remembers that Solidarity was a trade union committed to anarcho-syndicalism?) But Applebaum is right to point out ways in which the system sabotaged itself. Totalitarian fantasies of control kept these societies in a perpetual condition of ...”

“... or to avoid her life? Is the very thoroughness of her need to turn Stevenson’s tale into a self-help book part of the problem, not the solution? The narrator’s long-suffering boyfriend, Lars, is adamant that Treasure Island is ‘a story, not a user’s manual’. But Levine’s novel asks: what can we use fictions to do for us? Stevenson’s story ...”

“... occasion of “Depressive, clinically anxious feelings”.’ Another later note on his adolescent self: ‘Feet too thin and narrow and toes oddly shaped, ankles too thin, calves not muscular enough; thighs squnch out repulsively when you sit down; pecker too small or if not too small in terms of shortness too small in terms of circumference.’ Yet, as Max ...”

“... not a sonnet about a toy pony, flippantly comic and then thunderously serious? How about a plainly self-conscious, awkwardly (winkingly) rhymed Shakespearean sonnet, with a Shakespearean allusion and a Petrarchan turn (‘But no,// you are alone’)? How about an epithalamion that morphs into something like its jubilant opposite, a personal greeting to ...”

“... of the value of scholarly knowledge to common life is given momentary substance. This largely self-educated bookseller’s son, scarred by scrofula, partially blind and deaf, afflicted by obsessive thoughts as well as a constitutional melancholy which he claimed made him ‘mad all his life, at least not sober’, prone to compulsive movements, rituals ...”

“... Khlebnikov, had died in 1922, but Kharms joined the group that had formed around Khlebnikov’s self-professed heir, the now largely forgotten poet Aleksandr Tufanov. Through these connections, Kharms met a number of other poets and writers, with whom he founded an experimental theatre group in 1927; this in turn was the basis for a new literary movement ...”

“... writing we often sense that an emphatic commitment is being played off against a meditative self-consciousness. Hazlitt is a good hater, but one of the things he most hates is the man who refuses to countenance ‘the bye-play of various points of view’. Offered the choice between being full of conviction or being open-minded, he chooses both by ...”

“... opportunities that came at the end of the 1920s with the First Five-Year Plan. The ‘new-minted, self-confident, optimistic and passionately patriotic’ Soviet intelligentsia of the 1930s, Slezkine concludes, showed ‘no anti-Jewish hostility and generally very few manifestations of ethnic ranking or labelling’. The Great Purges of the late 1930s were a ...”