“... first has been variously interpreted: by some as naked, mean greed; by others as honourable self-deception, born of the arrogance of lust for fame. The incident becomes easier to understand when one realises that Columbus’s transatlantic voyage, though unprecedented in history, had a precedent in literature. In a Spanish version of the Romance of ...”

“... who are unhappy but not depressed (‘dysthymics’ in the esoteric language of psychiatry) great self-confidence and the ability to accept rejection without being upset. He supports this claim with a series of case-histories drawn from his own patients. Unfortunately psychiatric case-histories are a modern form of fairy story, whose fallibility is well ...”

“... at all, that her exquisite grace on screen derived from her instinctive projection of her real self. As with her fellow-narcissist Greta Garbo, the pull which Marilyn exerts for Eighties audiences has to do with a quality which throve in unreflective innocence and which is in these post-feminist days extinct. And the fascination of her story lies in the ...”

“... come to him for confidential counsel in this delicate area. There may have been a lack of full self-knowledge in such behaviour, but I cannot see that, initially at least, there need have been hypocrisy. Nothing is clearer from the record than the fact of O.B.’s possessing ‘the Socratic gift of maieusis’ that Lowes Dickinson attributes to him. Under ...”

“... class system, a wild colonial boy who stands for the ‘ordinary’ man. There is a certain self-conscious filial piety here. His father, Keith Murdoch, was partly responsible for establishing the received view of the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, in which thousands of heroic Australians and New Zealanders were sacrificed to the incompetence and ...”

“... with Dix encouraged its rivals to hire agony aunts of their own. Soon they were appearing in more self-consciously serious publications such as Lansbury’s Labour Weekly and the Miner. Though the audience for these columns was often assumed by both editors and readers to be female, half of Dix’s letter writers were male. Mainly, and predictably, they wrote ...”

“... boxes, packed away with the books, leaflets, articles, pamphlets, flyers, punk CDs and ‘Will Self Is Stupid’ badges Home gave me to help with my researches. So many different authors, formats, purports; except that all of it was really done by him. Stewart Home was born in South London in 1962, and, until recently, has lived and worked in Bethnal ...”

“... an inveterate liar is to do him less than justice. He was in fact a compulsive fantasist and self-inventor. The only child of Ashkenazi Jews from the Pale of Settlement, he clung to his fantasies with such tenacity that they became the source of a precarious yet highly successful career as a writer and an authority on all matters ‘Oriental’ – a ...”

“... would want to appear, it was because since childhood she had been anxiously polishing her own self-image. Born in 1741 in Switzerland to a Swiss mother and an Austrian father, Kauffman was an accomplished artist by the age of 12. It was then that she painted the first of her many self-portraits and the last in which she ...”

“... or freeing a rich Danish recluse from blackmailers, but beyond this they are voyages of self-discovery, quests for self-knowledge, searchings for one’s soul, ending in regeneration or rebirth in life, or in self-sacrifice and transfiguration in death. One would not wish to ...”

“... on the subject is entirely his own: it is not the revenge one minds so much as the perpetual self-glorification of these saints and martyrs and their profound impudence. How one loathes them in their ‘new white garments’. How disgusting their priggish rule must be! How vile is their spirit, really, insisting, simply insisting on wiping out the whole ...”

“... her only recourse is to victimise herself more shockingly than even her enemies can. And with her self-inflicted wounds she is supposed to win a kind of freedom. We encounter the heroine at the inaugural moment of her first messy period and awkward bra. As a girl, Sadie is neglected by a moderately amiable mother and abused by a drunken stockbroker ...”

“... her three earlier novels translated into English, the protagonists are often thwarted by a lack of self-understanding. In Love (1997), which unfolds over a single night in northern Norway, Jon thinks endlessly of the celebration he imagines his mother, Vibeke, is planning for his ninth birthday. Vibeke, meanwhile, focuses on anything but Jon, among them a ...”

“... the family unit. In the 19th century, Charles Fourier drew up blueprints for ‘phalansteries’, self-contained communities of around a thousand people who would undertake all the necessary tasks (children would be looked after in the ‘noisy area’, next to the carpenters and blacksmiths). Jane Sophia Appleton designed kitchenless cities where everyone ...”

“... of thoughts totally uninfluenced by the existence of mechanics and their grubby mechanisms. The self-appointed cardinal, Arthur Koestler, ever vigilant for the appearance of mechanistic heresy, exploded with vitriol all over the pages of the Sunday Times when reviewing this book. There are those who would take such an attack as a compliment and a ...”