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“... of 23 years before The Fox in the Attic (the nominal focus of my piece), which was conceived as a self-contained story but ended up as the first volume of a trilogy: getting started is half the problem; knowing when to stop is the other. The second volume, The Wooden Shepherdess, took another 12 years and, though it has its moments, feels messy and ...”

“... welfare can best be achieved if individual participants in the market, motivated by rational self-interest, are allowed to engage in economic activity unhampered by government, which should restrict itself to ‘setting the legal conditions of political freedom’. If markets are perfect, it follows that any interference by government will introduce ...”

“... my dream narrative. Susan Manning argues that themes of the pursuer becoming the pursued, of self-mirroring and doubling, of pilgrimages and impenetrable ‘centres’, are, in a special sense, Calvinistic, and reflect religious influences peculiarly strong in Scottish and American literature. Manning’s derivation of such themes from puritan ...”

“... Rousseau and Kant: that we are only individuals in so far as we are social. None of us has a self to be faithful to except the one which has been cobbled together in interchanges with parents and siblings, friends and enemies, churches and governments. Even if we bring something new and idiosyncratic into the world, it will be at best a slight ...”

“... plums that were in/the stockpile/and which/you were probably/saving/for post-Brexit.’ Or, more self-referentially: ‘I have enjoyed The meme/That is based on/The plums poem/And which you/Are probably/Sick/Of seeing on here.’People are definitely sick of seeing Kaur circulating online, but they keep buying books of her poetry. Her first collection, milk ...”

“... The visual pun depreciates the city of Joyce’s forebears, suggesting the voluntary exile’s self-justifying, cosmopolitan hauteur: but it also cherishes the place. James Fenton’s joky, vaguely self-indulgent punning on place, paper and title also indicates a more than merely joky intent. A manila envelope made in ...”

“... solidarity – in fact, he detested and despised the other soldiers; it was rather an exercise in self-purification, a proof to himself that he could live in the right spirit. The war, he said, saved him from suicide by effecting a transformation of his soul: it enabled him to achieve the state of ethical seriousness he sought. It was in the same spirit that ...”

“... of the visit to the fair and an apt metaphor for the complex distortions of multiple-narrative self-conscious fiction. Prodigious vitality, virtuosity, erudition, self-parody and a grossly anarchic humour were the characteristics of the ‘funhouse’ style, which soon came to be identified with novelists such as ...”

“... path, with middle interests, dizzy with ordinariness. Ugh!’ ‘Going through a long period of self-discontent.’ ‘Sense of waste.’ ‘Need to find a striking individuality.’ ‘People bore me profoundly and desperately.’ ‘The complete pointlessness of overdrinking.’ Ah, yes, you guessed! This is your younger ...”

“... Pain is one of the new pleasures, abuse is the new nurturing. A hummable, weepable, narcissistic self-pity, hitherto only available in the speeches of Billy Graham and the recording work of Tammy Wynette, has, over the last few years, taken Britain by storm, and it is nowhere more evident than in the new style of celebrity autobiography. Many modern ...”

“... used to be the sublime, used to be present tense – seat of the now-dissolved now. There. My self, my one-self isn’t working for me. No. I flaps its empty sleeves. Habit stares at the four horsemen from the end’s endlessly festooned terrace. It stares. Bullets whine. I dreams of being a girl, a man, of wearing ...”

“... Although it’s counter-intuitive, neither sex nor the pursuit of self were inventions of the 20th century. In his snatch of vérité during the film Reds, Henry Miller hazarded the view that people have always done a lot of fucking. Montaigne settled to his solitary task of reflective self-examination in the mid-16th century ...”

“... observer and engaged critic lay in his equal commitment to the idea of the opposing or divided self. As Krupnick says, every ‘yes’ in his writing is followed by a ‘no’ – ‘in a rhythm nearly as regular as breathing, or the systole and disatole of the heart’. His early and remarkable short story, ‘Of this time, of that place’, had already ...”

“... more struck by what he called, in a characteristically prudent phrase, Russell’s ‘detailed self-absorption’. All this, one might think, would be something of a gift to a biographer: a dispersed autobiography to accompany the known facts. And yet in retrospect – in the light of this troubled and troubling second volume – one can see that Monk was ...”

“... them less life-like. A character, after all, is not a real person but a kind of ‘experimental self’, and the novel in Kundera’s hands is a ‘meditative interrogation’ conducted in the hope of getting to the heart of that self in that situation. Vital aids to this process are certain key terms. To understand ...”