“... Conversely, Life goes on, like most fiction nowadays, is not free of the heavy hand of writerly self-consciousness. Virtually every (male) character here is at once an actual rogue and a potential writer. Cullen in his less frenetic moments sits down to write a novel on his father’s behalf which brings home the prestigious Windrush Prize. His friend Bill ...”

“... urgent, impressive. As a result, in no other literature is the writer so much a performing self, as Richard Poirier has observed, and in no other literature is such a premium placed on raw data and its virtuoso delivery. The American interest in ‘fact’ derives from the same complex of attitudes. One can see it not only in the regularly contemptuous ...”

“... to know where we are by never being anywhere else. And one fundamental means of orientation, of self-recognition, is the difference between the sexes, despite the fact that in practice they keep leaking into each other. Once you stop pointing to body parts and start talking, the apparent differences between men and women begin to dissipate. So if we ...”

“... an aesthete fostered some paragraphs which are subjected to a withering critique in his remarkable self-portrait Pack My Bag, written in 1938-9 under the threat of war and now reissued. He began his first novel Blindness while still at school; it came out while he was at Oxford. His account of undergraduate life there in Pack My Bag is a little rushed, but it ...”

“... his sons would have had much greater opportunities to enjoy and consolidate their debauched and self-indulgent idea of monarchy. If Victoria rather than Albert had died in 1861, Edward VII might have reigned and rogered for fifty years, which would surely have tried the patience even of the long suffering Queen Alexandra. If Edward VIII had not ...”

“... confirmed that ‘everybody with even a minor respiratory tract infection or a fever should be self-isolating for a period of seven days.’ I was in court that day watching a landlord’s representative demanding immediate possession against a tenant in her mid-forties who was in rent arrears by £2000. The barrister made a number of points, some ...”

“... walked in off the street? It’s very hard to describe this effect. Rudavsky-Brody speaks of ‘self-parody’; Auden says another poem is ‘burlesque’. These are very good intuitions, but we need to keep going. If Valéry was Eliot, we would think of irony; if he was Yeats or Pound, we might reach for the idea of performance. Rilke could be a closer ...”

“... the individual, honour was understood as a quality with interior and exterior aspects, a form of self-esteem requiring constant confirmation from the community. The honourable man sought to be generous, honest, elegant, courteous and courageous, and to be known for possessing these qualities. If a man could not think of himself as honourable, he could not ...”

“... was killed in Romania by the advancing Red Army), he worked his way out of hardship and became a self-described ‘consistent Marxist’ in his early political career. He was elected to the Bundestag in 1980 and is said to have stood outside the Chancellery in Bonn one night after a lengthy visit to a local pub, shaking the fence and shouting: ‘I want to ...”

“... and the possibility of happiness, the pursuit of which would come to dominate visions of American self-fulfilment.If indentured service was a type of slavery, as has often been maintained, it followed the classical model according to which, through manumission, unfree Romans might level up to full citizenship. In any case, unlike black slaves, white ...”

“... seemed to get its freedom and intensity back: richnesses that had been suppressed – either by self-censorship or academic dictate – since the days of Delacroix. No one did colour more blatantly and more unexpectedly than Van Gogh. Its blatancy gives his pictures their roaring charm. Colour, he seems to be saying: you haven’t seen colour before, look ...”

“... can seem mythical. Like proper myths, its stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements. Jean Stein’s book deploys a wonderful grace in uncovering a monstrous reality – it tells brilliant stories, sometimes very personal ones, and lets their ...”

“... show at California State College, Fullerton, and placed an ad in Artforum magazine. Other forms of self-fashioning were also afoot. For the exhibition poster Chicago posed as a prize fighter in a boxing ring. She appears, crop-haired and stocky, in shorts, ankle boots and gloves, leaning against the ropes. The words ‘JUDY CHICAGO’ are printed across the ...”

“... things, the assured place of the artist, his or her necessary significance within the culture. The self-cure for insignificance is paranoia, and Trotter’s Paranoid Modernists are marked, above all, by a sense of what is unbearable about modern life. They weren’t exactly trauma theorists themselves, but much of the writing of the period has a manifesto-like ...”

“... of the Home Rule party, were the Fenians, or the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the self-appointed guardians of the separatist, republican tradition. Very much in a minority, Fenianism was nevertheless a crucial presence in Irish nationalism, representing ideals that few constitutional politicians could afford openly to ignore. Irish MPs paid ...”