“... to preach to. The other thing, your happiness programme, fits in with the recent trend for self-expression. All in good time. Why is ...”

“... He liked using a histrionic ‘we’ to align himself with some group that was being hounded by self-appointed guardians of philosophical propriety: ‘we pragmatists’, ‘we anti-representationists’ or ‘we historicists’, for example, or, most inclusively, ‘we ironists’ – cheerful, tolerant, optimistic democrats who, having let go of ...”

“... but in a friendly spirit, Hirschman appears to have been spoilt by success. There is an element of self-indulgence, sometimes of self-congratulation, that prevents him from achieving the same rigour and clarity that characterised his earlier work. The self-indulgence shows itself in a ...”

“... wants to find safety,’ as Canetti has put it. Thomas Mann was notorious for his self-importance and his suspicion of anyone whom he felt might be detecting signs of weakness in him; Thomas Hardy spent his last days writing venomously bad verses against fellow authors whom he felt had patronised him. Across the Atlantic the Hemingways and ...”

“... the end of British rule. He was also afflicted by overweening arrogance, dogmatic certainty and a self-destructive fondness for Johnnie Walker Black. In spite of his extraordinary talent, which led him from the back-country of Luoland in western Kenya to the graduate economics programme at Harvard, he ended his life at 46 as a mid-level bureaucrat in ...”

“... hands of Burbage/Hamlet/Brutus. Hamlet’s desperate efforts to shore up the difference between self and show, acting and performance, produce in him an existential vertigo – a nausea that would be unrecognisable to the hero of The Revenger’s Tragedy. Though Vindice is momentarily troubled by a ‘doubt/Whether I’m myself or no’, his ...”

“... claims, Styron’s novel stages ‘a massive – and daringly modernist – project of racial self-transcendence’. How ‘daringly modernist’ is this project, given that, in 1773, John Bicknell and Thomas Day published a first-person poem called The Dying Negro, based on a newspaper account about a slave who shot himself rather than be sent to the ...”

“... interviewees, a vivid picture emerges of the parsonage and its inhabitants: the literary (self-described) eccentric, Patrick, working on his sermons, agitating for local causes and eating his meals alone. Aunt Branwell – Elizabeth Branwell – who came to care for the children after the death of their mother, her sister Maria, and is remembered for ...”

“... with the regular and not excessive marching speed of the universe explain his buying one of those self-winders: he was a busy man and couldn’t afford the soft unclear evaporation of minutes, a day or two a year. The busy man winds his watch on as he drives, writes a prescription, taps a sweating back. But later, sitting for hours rehearsing from his ...”

“... milky voice Of course I’ll wake you up when he comes; and then his eyelids close, and in his self-created darkness he is following a big car on a motorway at night, it turns into the driveway to the house, and presently the driver gets out: it is only a bear in the moonlight, walking on the lavender ...”

“... False Spring A lift in the weather: a clemency I cling to like the legend of myself: self-exiled, world-wounded, god of evenings like this, eighty degrees and half a world away. * All night, the industry of erasure, effacement, our one mouth working itself dry. * But even a god can’t stop the light that finds us, annealed, fruitless, two strangers broken on the field of day ...”

“... Motion is not a condition but a desire to be outside of one’s self and all desire must be swept away so saith fatso Gautama bus-like under the shade of some shrub in the Deer Park in some grove some municipal greensward chewing a leaf that has left him stoned as a stone stone-like mouthing this sententious drivel some errand-boy some rich man’s son dutifully sets down on a dusty tablet ignoring the insects and snakes After midnight under the arc-lights like a giant sound stage the abandoned set of an action spectacular Mrs Kiniski’s team goes bus to bus hoovering candy-wrappers crumbs and then with their scrapers attending to the grease and impacted filth and gum as Rudolfo sluices away in the south-east corner and the boss, with a sigh comes to the end of Hermann Hesse’s Siddartha Phalanx upon phalanx of impassive Buddha-wagons silver hulls and red trim Fleet of the Three Jewels the Attainment & Perfection City Transit Corp ...”

“... not hopelessly lost) educative, retrievable, and involves the necessary destruction of a false self – in this case, the self that is not yet close to God, not yet shepherded in. Breakdown is purposive, has a language that is coherent (for those with the ears to hear), and is nothing less than a sign of the operation of ...”

“... of a Galsworthy or a Wells, though these novelists would have allowed their narrators a greater self-awareness than ever comes Hugh Gordon’s way. He has spent his time since leaving Oxford working in London for the Third World causes championed by his incongruously left-wing wife, and after the double failure of his marriage and his return to Starne he ...”