“... one who has seen most. Of all the characters in the book, Wairimu is granted the most developed self-consciousness, so she emerges as the everywoman figure, the character whose destiny the reader takes to be representative, and around which the destinies of the other characters group themselves. The novel begins where Wairimu’s story begins: on a ...”

“... Exchange in due course taking an interest. Lloyd’s of London, on the other hand, has always been self-regulated. What is at issue here is whether insiders in Lloyd’s (the working underwriters) took advantage of their position to subject outsiders (external Names) to excessive risk, or even actually to defraud them. If not, Lloyd’s have no case to ...”

“... come. To grow old, as Simone de Beauvoir said, ‘is to define oneself’ and being defined, even self-defined, is privative as well as positive. The ascent to seniority prunes possibility: the old are what they are and, to a lesser extent, what they have been, though past achievements rarely compensate, often seeming more past than achievement. Even for ...”

“... wrote Lincoln Steffens. ‘She was large; she dressed as a large woman ... You felt ... her self-contentment and shared her self-composure, but, best of all, the prophetess gave you glimpses of what a Buddha can see by sitting still and quietly looking.’ This is the pattern of Stein’s extraordinary legend; she ...”

“... the more public dancer and bather pastels accorded their subjects a greater degree of modesty and self-respect. ‘It was in his monotypes,’ Richard Thompson observes in his study of the nudes, ‘rather than his pastels, that Degas most overtly exposed the female body to the male gaze.’ Callen disagrees. Her aim is to demonstrate that these diverse ...”

“... grinding routine of a doomed Borgesian clerk than the process of happy alchemies effected by the self-nourishing creative imagination. You sometimes feel that the important thing for Emerson was just to keep on writing for writing’s sake – not for any climactic or residual statement, but for the sheer motion of the process. ‘All language is vehicular ...”

“... stories. Often structured around a quest, for a missing child, a vanished woman, a former self, a meaning, an answer, they finally take the form of a flight, as if from a horror too great to bear or name, a shock one can only circle again and again, and at last abandon. ‘Do I write to escape, to make a fiction of my life?’ Wideman asks in his ...”

“... she wouldn’t have been the only or the last woman to have been caught between the pressures of self-improvement and the puritan values of America. What’s a girl without congenital wealth to do if she hasn’t been blessed with some class-effacing talent or exceptional looks, when she knows that success in life is the result of an individual’s ...”

“... Church history, published in 1822). As for The Prelude, Wordsworth’s groundbreaking epic of the self, it would have appeared promptly, one assumes, in the enthralling, exploratory version of 1805, ‘instead of Wordsworth spending nearly forty years revising it, almost always for the worse’. The family would have published other important manuscripts from ...”

“... I doubted that the bouncy, healthy-looking Danes could have produced a worthwhile writer. (Their self-assurance, their cycling, their perfect teeth: where was the despair?) I never made it to the Little Mermaid, but by the time I left I’d finished Childhood. Walking the streets of Copenhagen, gloomy and bored, I had accidentally immersed myself in the Tove ...”

“... play the social game at which his friend and colleague Hubert Robert excelled. In his infrequent self-portraits, Fragonard preferred to depict himself in the same tondo format that he used to paint his wife, Marie-Anne Gérard; his sister-in-law, Marguerite (who moved in with the couple in 1775); his daughter, Rosalie; and his son, Alexandre-Évariste. These ...”

“... for words which sound like the squelching of a leaky boot, raises this doctrine to the point of self-parody. In poetry like Heaney’s, you can hear the pluck and slop of brackish water as the signs button down snugly on their referents, whereas Donald Davie’s words stand at a chaster distance from his meanings. This, needless to say, is linguistic ...”

“... there is the work of complexity theorists, who argue that there are rich seams of non-programmed, self-organising and self-assembling order in the natural world that offer natural selection a helping hand by generating complex patterns without the intervention of genes. Evolution, from this perspective, is driven by an ...”

“... checks and balances of the Constitution in order to overcome the traditional fate of republican self-government. Throughout history, republics had been sustained – but only for so long – by the virtuous self-rule of their citizens; inevitably, patriotic commitment to the polis waned with the coming of luxury, which ...”

“... Wallace’s call for a more feelingful brand of postmodernism, though in different ways. Funny, self-deprecating and extremely clever in his journalism and essays,* Wallace in his fiction occasionally barricades his interest in ‘plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions’ behind uncompromising levels of reader-unfriendliness. Franzen, as he tells it ...”