“... 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 ...”

“... Jewish history, Zionism, the literature of the Holocaust. He has discovered new contexts for his self-interpretation, from Midrash to Yale Comp Lit. And as always, what he is saying is suggestive and elusive, as irritating as it is arousing. His descant about a Diasporist art seems at one minute to be describing a universal condition and, at the next, the ...”

“... as his structural principle. Philosophers’ questions lead to questions answered by questions; self-questionings lead on to closure by question, and that, in turn, to the ubi sunt motif and its troping by Spenser. En route, there are many Menippean delights, and much ostranenie, or defamiliarising freshness, in Hollander’s imitatively ...”

“... did it, but only because I was ambushed by some stranger hiding in my personality, some other self I wasn’t prepared to meet.’ By Gothic I mean that moment in a fiction when all the emotions go underground, when what seemed like a logical, if extravagant plot turns to nightmare, driven by forces that no one will name. The corpse, for instance, already ...”

“... to be in both poems and stories, in so far as he is able to isolate it, is not unity, however, but self-division; not completeness but a kind of provisionality; not the power of self-explanation but a refusal to make explicit what is at the heart of the work. The finest short stories, he argues, are peculiarly concerned with ...”