“... The Elvis bazaar is surely the low parody of Lourdes. To the images of sickness and suffering and self-sacrifice, the proprietors of the Elvis pilgrimage add a frank and frantic sexuality. The ambiguity of ‘passion’, long suspected in icons like Bernini’s Santa Teresa, here finally bursts forth and goes to town (Memphis). The nuns of Elvis spend their ...”

“... Iran might be ‘perverted into a weapon aimed directly at the heart of American nationalism and self-esteem’. There were some journalists, however, who were genuinely reflective. H.D.S. Greenway acknowledged in the Boston Globe on 21 January that ‘there was damage done to US interests by the American obsession with the hostage crisis to the exclusion of ...”

“... he looks back at a life of ‘botched beginnings, of tasks inadequately done’. There are gloomy self-appraisals: ‘Distracted, pleasure-seeking, frivolous, ever ready to fall in with other people’s wishes, desiring to please them, fearful of losing their good will. Years wasted, slipping by hour by hour, day by day, in a routine of undertakings external ...”

“... is a shock because it is unforeseen, but also because it is not unforeseeable. Prickly’s self-mutilation precipitates the sudden recognition of an awful congruity in everything that has led up to it, and we experience a sudden rush of meaning to the brain. This effect is typical of Tournier’s control of the short story form. When Prickly’s mother ...”

“... his written life he aimed to defend creativity and liberty, and to demonstrate the possibility of self-transformation of the profoundest kind. No human agent could mould his life with sufficient force and accuracy to deprive him of liberty (and of divine powers to do so he saw, unlike Augustine, no evidence). Mill describes how he slowly overcame his ...”

“... Gentry. His theme is not estate management, or local government, but the strenuous spiritual self-examination which, together with the belief in providence and the fear of Catholics, is now guaranteed a central place in any reputable account of the origins of the ‘Puritan Revolution’; and high time too. William Hunt, whose book is ostensibly about ...”

“... and visual art. Visual art returns to the fore in relation to another recurring theme: that of ‘self-reference’, in the sense that, for example, the paradoxical statement ‘I am lying’ is a statement about that statement itself. More advanced work in mathematical logic, including the proof of Gödel’s Theorem, develops the concept of ...”

“... you like’) while she was writing her own book of philosophy. There is no mistaking the self-references. Aristotle is distinctly absent from Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. Murdoch’s indexer strove valiantly to inject a little Aristotle, managing 13 entries. This feat was achieved by, for example, including a reference to the Aristotelian ...”

“... woman into one complicated misery after another. The ‘virtue’ to which she is attached is self-lacerating. ‘She remembered the maxim of her Philosopher, that it is better to be deceived by a thousand Rogues than to refuse one’s aid to a single person who truly deserves to be pitied. She felt herself very much consoled by this Reflection, and ...”

“... Christina Stead ‘resists the evil reductionism of our culture and never “totalises” the self (an ugly but useful word)’; ‘In great fiction the language is not only satisfying in itself, but it also fulfils larger purposes of design.’ This suggests that White is not a very natural critic, which matters little because he is so clearly a natural ...”

“... appeal to a succession of potential wives (his love-letters display an unendearing combination of self-pity, arrogance and wounded dignity), Malone seems to have resembled less the generous, self-effacing playwright whom he called his ‘MASTER’ than the most earnest servant, self-lover ...”

“... own teenage breakdown, feelings of intense despair and, according to her brother William, severe self-repression. Withdrawn and unhappy, he recalled, she gave up chess, ‘simply because it made her too eager for a win’. Whether it was the eagerness she feared or the winning, the poems that began to appear in her journals during these miserable years ...”

“... Meet the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, Gef the Talking Mongoose and, more prosaically, Doug and Dave, self-confessed manufacturers of crop circles. Thrill to ‘penis panic’ – five dead in Benin. If that’s too culture-specific, consider joining an epidemic of mass-psychogenic illness: dizzy spells and vomiting seem to be international in their appeal and ...”

“... bookish, and had been educated at home by ‘a long and dreary dynasty’ of governesses. Shy and self-conscious, sure that she ‘was not pretty’, she would rather have gone to Oxford than endure the rounds of fashionable parties: she had to ‘come out’ three times, in Florence, London and New York. She wanted to belong somewhere. Years later she would ...”

“... betrayals or fulfilments. ‘What remains of us is love’ in the sense that love equates with self-extinction. I think Larkin here gives his own entombed precision to the symbol, which for the Symbolists gave out nothing but its own powers of suggestion. To Larkin it suggests the comfort of disappearance, selflessness, awayness, and in the universe this ...”