“... of the great specialists like Rafael Santos Torroella or Dawn Ades, let alone to the artist’s self-assessment as an impotent, infantile perverse polymorph and a bit of a monster. Take the 1942 autobiography, The Secret Lift of Salvador Dalí, written to seal his rebirth into the post-Republican family of power. It was ...”

“... which had been founded in 1925. Not all of them saw themselves primarily as nationalist, or sought self-government for Wales, but, as King shows, they were densely interconnected.The new direction taken by Welsh campaigners was signalled in 1962 when Saunders Lewis, a founding member of Plaid Cymru, made a speech arguing that defending the Welsh language and ...”

“... politics and nature. Instead Huxley started to search for a more timeless and ‘disembodied’ self. The gap between Huxley and his garish new world seems to have made this transition possible. Huxley opens After Many a Summer, the first novel he wrote in California, with a description of the sprawling landscape of Beverly Hills, seen through the ...”

“... of the militants but not of the constitutionalists, while Atkinson, mirroring the militants’ self-absorption, pretty much ignores the constitutionalists altogether. The movement deserves more hard-headed scrutiny: we should ask what it meant, for politics and for women themselves, for the claim to political equality to burst on the scene through the ...”

“... actions that would jeopardise national order and harmony. That claim of exceptionalism may seem self-satisfied and insular now, but it rested on an assumption that social peace was hard won and that human sinfulness, as Gladstone put it, was ‘the great fact in the world’.Parliament’s function was not just to block rash policies; it also had a ...”

“... or place comfortably in the context of contemporary British poetry, beyond the idiotic and self-marginalising labels of ‘outsider’ or ‘experimental’. A poem, Fisher said in an interview, ‘has business to exist … if there’s a reasonable chance that somebody may have his perceptions rearranged by having read it’. The poem exists as a ...”

“... way that’s clever and distanced but also consciously intense, with giving voice to parts of the self that not everyone puts on display. There are other similarities: a provincial city – Naples, Newark – that functions as the centre of the universe; an emphasis on the struggle between anarchic self-expression and the ...”

“... decision to retrain. People look to their jobs for so much that’s not written into any contract: self-respect, stability, social standing. Work is ‘a road’, as Richard Sennett once wrote, ‘to the unification of the self’. Except that it doesn’t usually end up like that, which is the reason the next page of the ...”

“... a lot of time distancing himself from contemporary poets and poetry, and particularly from their self-importance as bringers of news that was not news. He was interested in whether there was a good way of taking oneself seriously; and what, if anything, this had to do with the writing of poetry. The Lake Poets’ mistake, in Byron’s view, was to use nature ...”

“... the billionaires take to calling themselves the Meliorists, Nader has apparently abandoned the self-defeating dogma that the worse things get, the better they get: he aims instead to chart incremental progress towards an alternative politics. The results are mixed. Despite its noble intentions, this 733-page book is a trial to read. The writing is by turns ...”

“... collaborated on The Chairs Are Where the People Go, a book of ‘conversational philosophy’ (a self-help book for hipsters, really) that was made by Misha talking and Sheila typing, then shaping and assembling his thoughts into 72 mini-essays with titles like ‘Why a Computer Only Lasts Three Years’ and ‘Miscommunication Is Nice’. Heti ...”

“... the procedures of post-structuralism and deconstruction. They can talk about decentred texts and self-reflexive narration; they acknowledge that a text has an unconscious, and that it can be read against the grain of its author’s apparent intentions. They see that Eminem’s lyrics might be a ‘text’ in the way that Middlemarch is a text. They are often ...”

“... devastating effects for Polish nationhood. After the defeat of 1863, Poles were denied any form of self-rule, and the tsarist state attempted to make them into Russians, suppressing their religion, denying them higher education in their own language, rewarding assimilation. The trauma produced a counter-tendency to romanticism: positivism. Positivists judged ...”

“... personality evolved towards late-flowering celebrity. In one of Lees-Milne’s regular pessimistic self-assessments, amid laments about his loss of hair and declining libido at 40, he noted that despite it all his mental faculties, ‘never first-rate, are better than they have ever been’. ‘All my life,’ he adds, ‘I have been a slow developer.’ It is ...”

“... of individuals forced by the scarcity of public services and the cost of private treatment into self-dentistry, sometimes aided by cheap off-the-shelf ‘kits’ for basic treatments up to and including replacing lost fillings. Armstrong first came across the phenomenon in Paisley, where one woman, concerned about being fined for a missed dentist’s ...”