“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... When Marlowe met a different reckoning. He had been his usual snorting, railing, Blasphemous self, but loyal to his calling, As they all had to be, to live so well. He sang a noisy song before he fell, A dagger stuck in his eye after the feast As though the Cross had got to him at last. They saw each other home after his death. The rats had tired, the ...”

“... Helen says heaven, for her, would be complete immersion in physical process, without self-consciousness – to be the respiration of the grass, or ionised agitation just above the break of a wave, traffic in a sunflower’s thousand golden rooms. Images of exchange, and of untrammelled nature. But if we’re to become part of it all, won’t our paradise also involve participation in being, say, diesel fuel, the impatience of trucks on August pavement, weird glow of service areas along the interstate at night? We’ll be shiny pink egg cartons, and the thick treads of burst tyres along the highways in Pennsylvania: a hell we’ve made to accompany the given: we will join our tiresome productions, things that want to be useless for ever ...”

“... The self-appointed guardian of our streetstands all day in the doorwayof the house opposite,glaring at everyone who passes.His job is making sure the sun never shineson his side of Raleigh Street.He holds out his hand for rainand storm clouds gather to his cause.I spoke to him onceabout some misdirected mail I’d received,saying my own mail sometimes went astrayto nearby Raleigh Mews ...”

“... the great man said, all happy families are not alike,’ he tells us (as a narrator he is prone to self-justification and literary allusion): happiness for the Quinns means Felix manoeuvring his wife, Marisa, into the vicinity of a hunky man and then fading expectantly into the background. He turns up late to their dance lessons, hoping to find her tangoing ...”

“... When we say that nobody but God can see into a human heart, ‘nobody’ includes one’s own self, ‘if only because our sense of unequivocal reality is so bound up with the presence of others that we can never be sure of anything that only we ourselves know and no one else’. The consequence of this is that our entire psychological life is cursed with ...”

“... but widened afterwards. Certain details have survived: he recalls explaining in a ‘hushed and self-important’ voice to the headteacher, two days after her death, why he hasn’t done his homework. But much from that time remains a mystery, and there are as many questions as answers in the account. For instance, it’s unfathomable to Frayn how his ...”