“... she argues, are being condescending when they dismiss ‘thrift, prudence, diligence, temperance, self-reliance’ as exclusively bourgeois virtues imposed on the Victorian poor as a measure of social control. True, Victorian middle-class reformers were eager to create a ‘moral citizenry’. But many workers responded to their efforts because they too ...”

“... in Saigon) to include a sense of the wider world and its troubles in its hero’s search for self-knowledge. Burgess begins with a little metallurgy and quite a lot of history and mythology. A sword, Excalibur perhaps, links up the parts of the novel and is symbolic in its action. A Welshman, David Jones, runs away to sea, survives the sinking of the ...”

“... is concerned with discovering the truth about ‘them’ – objects outside the areas of his own self. Even if he is inquiring into the inmost psyche of patients, he must inevitably treat them as objects. Religion is primarily subjective. It is concerned with what never can be objectified: the ‘I’ in each one of us which as pure existence and ...”

“... giant forms contend with each other chiefly over the issue of priority. Each aspires to be self-begotten by his own quickening power, to adapt words of Milton’s Satan that Bloom finds congenial. But this inevitably cannot be. Even at the apex of their ‘originality’, poets are rewriting – and being rewritten by – their ‘strong ...”

“... assumed before, as a matter of course, that death was desirable.’ Between Theroux’s democratic self-effacement and Greene’s isolation of the self lie the dangers of half-measure: shoring up your unease at occupying centre-stage with plenty of solid book-learning, or affecting a complacent high profile of ...”

“... to endorsing it. Front-line journalists usually have a high opinion of themselves, but Neil’s self-regard is loud, unique, indestructible. As he plods doggedly through his 11 years editing what he describes as one of the most influential newspapers on earth, he is continually dumbfounded by the sheer scale of his achievement. He became editor in October ...”

“... for almost everything that ails you. For the Jews, however, there is only a single very busy, self-important and fractious God. So it seemed to me when I was young. I was troubled by the unreliability of prayer, rather as one feels anxious about sending important letters to large organisations. Anne Frank is the only Jewish saint. I first read the diary ...”

“... Outland in Willa Cather’s A Professor’s House). In literature, it is more delightful to lose a self than to gain one. In Play It As It Lays (1970) a guest at a good hotel glamorously descends into dementia: The room was painted purple, with purple Lurex threads in the curtains and bedspread. Because her mother had once told her that purple rooms could ...”

“... he pretend it will, that when he explains the naming of the names it is not in a spirit of feeble self-justification, but in terms of an apostasy that has been carefully charted throughout the book. It could have been no such thing to his former friends and partners in the Group, or the collective Theatre in Action, or even the later Actors’ Studio. He is ...”

“... of one of the large Israeli parties or of Arafat’s PLO, but as an intellectual who speaks for self-determination through citizenship and equality for Jew and Arab. He is as much a threat to the established Arab order as he is to Israel. In Nazareth that night he introduced me to a polite but inquisitive crowd. I mentioned that the event was something of a ...”

“... People (1837), he surveys some two dozen texts, erudite and eccentric in turn, compiled by the self-taught in opposition to the academy, but popular and influential in their time. They range from the work of witty polemicists like Harvey Johnson, who in 1903 examined the failings of white society, asking whether whites could ever be trusted to govern ...”

“... close ranks against outsiders. Hooper makes much of what he regards as tell-tale memory lapses and self-contradiction among those he interviewed, and of the mysterious disappearance of vital documents: most of Koprowski’s papers from this time had been ‘lost in a move’. He describes how he and fellow whistle-blowers were threatened with defamation writs ...”

“... character. Clearly, this business is getting on my nerves. Perhaps I have embarked on a voyage of self-discovery. In any case, Miss Voigt doesn’t reply. Nor is my wife prepared to keep me company. ‘You will not enjoy this,’ she says, with the confidence of someone who is in a position to know. ‘And I do not wish to hear the things that you will say ...”

“... even loyalty and affection, tend to career wildly out of control. Disorder is the norm; and self-understanding a bitter joke. If Roth’s characters discover that ‘the direction of life is toward incoherence,’ their creator appears to believe that the direction of writing is towards coherence. The slovenliness of living is matched by the severity of ...”

“... Keynesians and monetarists is not the role of money but beliefs as to whether the economy is self-regulating and will, if left alone, quickly return to full employment. For Keynesians, aggregate demand is not self-regulating but must be corrected with either monetary or fiscal policies. For the monetarists, no such ...”