“... reform. The Thirties attitude was at once more political and less so. This was the period when self-consciously progressive intellectuals, many of them decidedly unpolitical in the traditional sense, were driven by guilt and romantic despair to join the Communist Party. They felt not merely uncomfortable about the existence of poverty, but personally ...”

“... from the human norm. ‘Foolish girl that I was,’ she cries out again when she considers her self-will and her passions. Looking back on her failure to be anything more than a deviant, she eventually elects to see herself as nothing less than a damned soul – damnation is a kind of fame – and mysteriously speaks at the end of her story of being ...”

“... to morality are for that reason clearer and more cogent. So-called personality is a matter of self-interest: bees in a hive have no moral problems. Examining their own world and using their own vocabulary, empirical and linguistic philosophers quite naturally and rightly come to such conclusions. Hume could perceive only a bundle of sensations, and Parfit ...”

“... his subjects back their humanity. He shares with us more than their suffering – he reveals their self-respect. It is a measure of Britain’s crisis that the political travelogue survives as a genre despite the high technology and mobility of our ubiquitous media. Now as ever, wordsmiths take to the hinterland to find ‘the people’ – not least ...”

“... Englishness – as the enemy of life, love and any sort of contact with the world that is not self-protective and self-regarding. The sentences I have already quoted from the book may begin to give an idea of how fierce this attack and this regret can be. There is a clue to this development in a magnificent piece in ...”

“... perfectly tenable legal logic founded on originalist principles and what seemed to the Court to be self-evident truths about race. The torture memos produced by Bush’s office of legal counsel are ignoble, immoral and arguably plain wrong; but they are legal arguments. What then, Balkin finally asks, if a politically packed bench, using such arguments, cedes ...”

“... one in which the great scientific and literary figures are outnumbered by chancers, eccentrics and self-publicists, Holmes escapes the familiar Romantic canon and reveals the spirit of the age from fresh perspectives. If the story amounts to a chronicle of failures they are nonetheless unpredictable and sometimes delightful failures. An attempt at the altitude ...”

“... his feelings were genuine’ – and ending his story with a bout of masturbation and compulsive self-harming. Henrik’s coda would make a useful introduction to Don Bartlett’s translation of the first instalment of My Struggle, which Knausgaard’s British publishers have called A Death in the Family. In addition to explaining the aura of mystery that ...”

“... websites that give themselves a plug. But some authors seem nonplussed by the need for all this self-promotion, distrusting the visitors their sites may attract. ‘If you are a lazy and/or unimaginative journalist,’ A.L. Kennedy chaffs on her website, ‘you may consider using the material contained in these pages to pad out your ...”

“... struggles to produce the perfect work; Pieces of Light (1998), in which Ulverton makes a self-conscious reappearance; and Nineteen Twenty-One (2001), in which a man tries to write the first definitive novel of the First World War. Thorpe’s artists do not have a good time. The director in Still can’t make his film; the novelist in Nineteen ...”

“... industrial change in which we are now caught up. This is why trade unions in Britain require self-reform, and a new role. Was it not Sir Thomas More who predicted in the 16th century that if the Catholic Church did not reform itself from within it would be reformed from without? And so it was. One of my proud possessions is a copy of the history of the ...”

“... body of verse he has produced in between there are a good many poems tinctured by the same kind of self-justifying self-deprecation. He very soon ceased to make tremendous statements, preferring on the whole to notice whatever seems to deserve that favourite epithet ‘odd’, and to meditate on the trouvaille. The Middle of ...”

“... blueprint for a regenerated society, and what Shelley is concerned about here is the tactics of self-preservation in an obstinately unregenerated society ... It may be objected that Prometheus plans to retire from a regenerated world, but the point there is that Prometheus and Asia have no business in such a world, for they are immortals. Prometheus’ job ...”

“... and developing its themes with time-consuming thoroughness and deliberation.Meanwhile, in Paris, a self-effacing young man of 22 – one of whose pieces of advice to composers would be to ‘keep it short’ – dashed off three miniature piano pieces, to which he gave the mysterious title Gymnopédies (it refers to a dance performed by naked young Spartan ...”

“... the prey of one’s own presumptuous energy.’ The play of this syntax has about it an untiring self-consciousness that is positively Jamesian. The ‘one’ who speaks does so on behalf of the generality of poets, is any poet. Yet he is also a particular poet. And for that poet to claim anything ‘darkly and impetuously’ is at one and the same time to ...”