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“... was not going to be numbered among the great American writers of her generation. The gloomy and self-dramatising tone is characteristic. In fact she was exceptionally robust, and nothing could break her. She went on writing for years, and lived to see a flurry of interest in her work before she died in 1902. But she never earned the public recognition she ...”

“... Ascendancy, are exemplars. The Anglo-Irish were notoriously eccentric and swashbuckling, full of a self-vaunting swagger that the less admirable side of Yeats found appealing. The wild old wicked man, as he liked to see himself, would link arms with a bunch of crazed, colourful peasants in opposition to the merchant and the clerk. Social conventions were for ...”

“... has already been lost. In the US and the UK inequalities of market income (wages, income from self-employment, dividends etc) carry through to inequalities of income after tax and benefits. In practice, it’s hard to alter this through redistribution alone: the key is to change the way the rewards of economic success are distributed in the first ...”

“... has a reputation for cockiness, but like a lot of cocky people his problem is not excessive self-belief but its opposite. His writing is often stagily masculine, like a sensitive adolescent who swears too much at not quite the right times in order to show how manly he is. He isn’t, as Byron said of Keats, always frigging his imagination, but he often ...”

“... practices and institutions which embodied both this ‘universal’ patriotism and a desire for self-improvement were forged from a sturdy amalgam of tradition, religious observance, deference, support of the military, pride, dislike of change and adherence to class and community. The brass band movement in particular conformed to Orwell’s view of ...”

“... Allen Tate, though, there were more pitfalls than plateaux. Tate was a quarrelsome type and deeply self-important; he had a taste for feuds, for laying down the law, for scolding friends who fell short of his elevated standards – both personal and literary. Many saw him as a somewhat comic figure, forever tinkering with the details of his Southern ancestry ...”

“... of empire, helping to define the Other in contrast to the West, and to justify the latter’s self-proclaimed superiority. This may be one reason drugs were so feared when they started spreading in Europe and the US in the 1960s: they threatened to reduce the superior race to the level of those it had dominated so effectively for two centuries. In ...”

“... few years, supermarkets had become the normal mode of food-selling in the United States, and ‘self-service’ became the shopping revolution of the century. A commentator on retail trends called M.M. Zimmerman set himself up as worldwide promoter of the big new idea but it was several decades before other countries, each initially in its own idiosyncratic ...”

“... it and breaking her trust. Near the end of the book, she describes the satisfaction she finds in self-denial, ‘a sick pleasure that felt like a hangover’. But it’s not all bad: ‘That restraint, that control at any cost, made me horrible at a lot of things, but it made me brilliant at my work.’Gyasi, who was born in Ghana and raised in the United ...”

“... science back. The full involvement of patients themselves, in the practical task of recovering the self that has been damaged or lost, is the largest of these missing parts. To complete the progress that the Russians started, Sacks calls for ‘a neurology of the self, of identity’, a task of neurological completion which ...”

“... an Eliot, however complex a matter, does not depend directly on their ‘views’, or upon their self-appointed role in society. Their legend is personal, not exemplary, and their achievement as poets is not a sort of holy collaboration with the national soul, a struggle requiring the poet to present himself as both prophet and sacrifice. And of course they ...”

“... of media, and in her lifetime was known as a writer, she is now remembered for her photographic self-portraits, mainly taken in the 1920s, which stage her in various personae (aviator, buddha, doll, angel). She never had an exhibition of photographs in her lifetime, and they hardly circulated. Thomson’s narrator is Schwob/Cahun’s life partner, Suzanne ...”

“... grandparents, in whose eyes Lennon had blown it by becoming the person he is in this interview: self-engrossed, witty, malicious, foolish – someone who is always ready to be disabused and reabused, obstinately drawn to contending kinds of ruin, aloft between frying pan and fire and flipping like a dervish pancake, yet equally convinced of a redemptive ...”

“... L’Étudiant noir in which he railed against assimilation as a route towards emancipation: the self-hatred and cowardice at the heart of ‘assimilation’ would never, he wrote, lead to true freedom for Black people under colonial rule. In Return to My Native Land, Césaire coined the term ‘négritude’ – broadly, ‘Blackness’ or ...”

“... the demoniacal, incestuous, lying, counterfeiting, fascist Freud’ – caricatures intended to self-destruct on being read. She lays out a stall of biographical red herrings and holds each one up for our inspection. She finds a form of life-writing a bit like wild analysis: the theories are summarily paraphrased, case histories are scrambled in the ...”