“... 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 ...”

“... and then half pay for a further 26 weeks. For the first seven days of my illness I can ‘self-certify’; after that I have to go to my GP and get what are, ironically, called ‘fit notes’ at regular intervals. If an employer doesn’t have an occupational sick pay scheme, they only have to pay workers Statutory Sick Pay – £99.35 a week for up ...”

“... would take the frequent changes of course as vacillations, Dreyfus and Rabinow see Foucault’s self-corrections as a healthy sign of learning from temporary mistakes without deviating from a central direction. Foucault himself says here that the theme of his research was always the subject (and, surprisingly, not power): that is, how human beings ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Schwartz’s sense of his uniqueness had nothing in common with Lowell’s type of lordly self-belief, nor with the obsessive thirst for fame that motivated a poet like John Berryman. His literary career is often compared pityingly with their astute professionalism, as if, authentic poète maudit though he was, he never quite got the marketing ...”

“... of writers.’ Schaberg’s book is a deliberately narrow study, rich in its suggestiveness, self-indulgent in its minutiae, regrettable in its flaws. He is censorious of the few who made earlier attempts at this kind of reconstruction; he records their tiny errors, missing commas and the like. His own book, however, is marred by mistranslations, by ...”

“... If it has weaknesses, they are the product of its strength. It doesn’t always stop short of self-congratulation. One would have to feel very sure of the advantages of not-reading to dismiss as a ‘dull affair’ a magazine whose first issue included Lewis’s ‘Enemy of the Stars’ and whose second issue included Eliot’s ‘Preludes’. The ...”

“... as the Encyclopaedia Britannica put it in 1787. It was as protomodernists, ideal familiars of the self-conscious urban individual, that cats came into their own. To the avant-garde their aloofness seemed introspective; their sphinx-like calm and hieratic inscrutability (that capacity to shutter their vision which had struck others as sinister) was at one with ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... time. Mourning the ‘death of Adam’, European intellectuals embraced a ‘less narcissistic’ self-image. Man no longer descended from the gods but instead emerged from beasts. In The Invention of Prehistory, Stefanos Geroulanos makes the opposite argument. Recognition of a past without people yielded a centuries-long ‘obsession’ with trying to find ...”

“... aesthetic and ethical disposition; violence, and in particular male violence against women; self-harm, especially but not exclusively women’s; and what she pointedly does not call masochism. ‘The mode of violence that gets beneath my skin and really haunts me is not those destructive acts perpetrated by one upon another, for reasons good, bad or ...”

“... bleakness, is it coolness, is it harshness? At a time when apparently everything is magnified by self-pity and the flinching or clamorous anticipation of pain, Li is entirely without. Things happen to her characters before they are ready, not after. The blade cuts into the flesh before there is the least outcry, and even then it will probably be bitten ...”

“... of the exotic.The appeal of this form of dress is evident in portraits of the period, including self-portraits, such as Constance Mayer’s near monochrome painting of 1799. Mayer’s simple, high-waisted dress is set off by the sombre browns and greys of the interior. Her melancholic pose – one hand to her head as she gazes out towards the viewer ...”

“... visible distillation, brandy-like, of the anima vagula blandula, the tenuous and transparent daily self that produced it. Another kind of good writing does not establish itself as involuntary personality, but as something the writer is just very, very good at doing. Such a dispossessed fluency seems available to everyone with a flair for catching a fashion. I ...”