“... that cite the medical or anecdotal literature – gobbets of prose which capture her sense of self, swallowed whole and regurgitated. From the dust-jacket on (Hornbacher is pictured, skinny and sad-eyed), the book has an air of perverse exhibitionism, as if writing about her thinness is a way of keeping her illness alive, albeit in a transmuted ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Cancer must sell almost as many books as cookery: not just old-fashioned self-help guides to detection or prevention, tips on how to survive the chemotherapy or colostomy (now lavishly illustrated with the kinds of photograph that were once allowed only in medical textbooks), but also a vast range of new-style ‘cancer journals ...”

“... did not last long. When the Liberal Administration which came to power in 1906 set about restoring self-government to the former Boer republics, Kipling gave up hope. ‘Isn’t it a holy mess? Less than 5 years after a big war the enemy are given control of the revenues and administration of the conquered country!’ A letter of July 1908 speaks of his recent ...”

“... inspiring schoolteacher, but his shyness stayed for a good deal of his adult life, and he remained self-effacing, with a tendency to smile at himself and the Gaelic culture which was crucial to him. Crichton Smith had a liking for Chinese restaurants, and wrote a number of poems (which he enjoyed delivering at readings) on Chinese themes. In one a couple ...”

“... and, of course, repression. I wasn’t there, and I’m glad I wasn’t. But there is nothing self-important about their earnestness, nor their nostalgia, and they take pains to justify the relevance of popular culture to academic study. In a section called ‘Keith Sculle’s World of Eating Out’, Sculle describes getting to know Chicago through its ...”

“... bleeding, to the ground; she kicks him repeatedly in the ribs. The attack – for all its self-abasement – is also a riot of pleasure. ‘When I had had enough I turned to Carla,’ she says, as if she had achieved fulfilment; and then a fantasy unfolds. ‘I wanted to drag along her beautiful face with the eyes the nose the scalp the blonde hair, I ...”

“... by her gender and class, persuaded her that she had found a vocation. Those who knew her as a self-effacing girl would have been astonished to learn that she became the first principal of Newnham College, Cambridge and a forceful figure in the gradual development of higher education for women. Sutherland’s book is mainly about her achievements, and ...”

“... them did something that was a genuine contribution to anthropology, but the rest was docudrama and self-promotion. The discipline seems particularly vulnerable to this form of exhibitionist exuberance, and the public’s greed for the sensational and the exotic fuels it. The mandate of anthropology is so broad that it easily bursts the bounds of strict ...”

“... room produces a reality distortion field. The energy shifts towards her, accompanied by a general self-consciousness about where to look or avoid looking. To be ordinary and receive a celebrity’s attention can breed self-importance. We have archetypes – the name-dropper, the starfucker – for those who seek out ...”

“... at St Columb’s. Hopkins’s ‘whole theology of suffering’, his determined enunciations of self-denial, also echoed Heaney’s ‘mother’s situation … doomed to biology, a regime without birth control, nothing but parturition and potato-peeling’, ‘toiling on in the faith that a reward was … in heaven’.The religious sensibility that led ...”

“... gun to his head but been unable to pull the trigger, thereby generating further grounds for the self-loathing which had driven him to his desperate act. Desperate and sinful: suicide, even attempted suicide, perhaps even the stagey simulation of possible suicide, is a sin against the Holy Ghost, and although Greene, who converted to Catholicism when he was ...”

“... a political celebrity. He discussed the ‘Negro Question’ – the question of Black people’s self-determination – with the ‘big Bolsheviks’, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Trotsky, and travelled the country educating the Soviets about Black people in America. (His book Negry v Amerike, published in the Soviet Union in 1923 but not in the West until ...”

“... way necessary to his agitated soul. Years later Balzac would produce a telling portrait of the self-torturing romantic loves of George Sand, Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult in the (relatively little-read) novel, Béatrix. It’s hard to know who could have done justice to the upper-class intellectual-bohemian melodrama played out in and around Coppet ...”

“... are at present under heavy philosophical battering, including the very idea of a stable inner ‘self’ and of a universally knowable ‘human nature’, and they deconstruct quite nicely under the Derridean wrecking ball. The Enlightenment was undoubtedly a mode of control, with its own orthodoxies. What needs to be emphasised at the moment, however, is ...”