“... and guffaw. What a weirdo. Shall we just say that my childish heart turned then to adamant? That self-protection meant fixing one’s eyes on blankness and acting dead? When I began thinking of myself as a lesbian – not so long afterwards, really – the age-old stereotype of the female homosexual as doomed misfit, lost in a dark and sterile world of ...”

“... as civilisational. They experience a more subtle and insidious form of oppression from their own self-critical gaze, constantly measuring themselves against the West (its science, its art, its movies, its soda pop), and invariably coming up short, haunted by what Benedict Anderson has called the ‘spectre of comparison’. On a trip to Venice as the ...”

“... and political and religious groupings, in many cases evidently motivated by personal resentment or self-interest, and it’s hard to imagine that The Divine Comedy would be an easy book to publish today. Reading Marco Santagata’s fascinating new biography, the reader is soon forced to acknowledge that one of the cornerstones of Western literature, a poem ...”

“... one is easily pleased with himself, the other suicidal. There’s a gambler, a concert pianist, a self-immolating artist, an anthropological linguist, a Nobel Prize-winning astronomer. The world of the novel, previously so narrow and skittery and badly lit – the world of a depressed, frustrated woman stuck to her computer screen – opens out to take in ...”

“... to it. When not staking his claim to Shakespeare he deliberately chose roles that reinforced his self-casting as a defiant, athletic personification of all-American patriotism. His favourites included Spartacus, depicted as a virtuous rebel against some very British-looking patricians in Robert Montgomery Bird’s melodrama The Gladiator (1831), and the ...”

“... reaction against the idea that new money is more comfortable with new art may have helped. If the self-made man in 1870 was expected to buy Millais or Millet, their still wealthier successors (characterised by Hook as ‘rough-hewn moguls’) would be tempted into a world of more durable as well as princely taste – ‘princely’, because princes had a ...”

“... My​ military career was on the comic side.’ Self-protective irony was Ian Watt’s chosen register when describing his wartime experience some twenty years later. That experience began when the 24-year-old Lieutenant Watt was posted, along with the rest of the 5th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment, to the Far East in the winter of 1941 ...”

“... in my life I am able to stand up to, or with, a man of my own age whose strength of purpose and self-discipline are at least as great as mine.’ V says she has an extraordinary mind: ‘You think things right through, by prisming them through yourself. Your mind is ten times as good as mine.’ And yet, there will be no dancing. When she moves in with ...”

“... think about.’ It seems almost a triumph from her rapist’s point of view to have made this self-protective separation necessary. Rosa imagines him triumphant, certainly, not carrying a guilty burden but enjoying ‘the lightness, I imagine a lightness, it must be light to be without knowing you are being, walking being walking, all safe as it can ...”

“... cosmopolitan constitution’ and thus ‘towards perpetual peace’.Kant prefaced his essay with a self-deprecating joke, suggesting that ‘Towards Perpetual Peace’ could have been the name of an inn, with a sign depicting a deserted churchyard – a resting place, perhaps, for ‘philosophers who dream a sweet dream of perpetual peace’. The joke wasn’t ...”

“... Marr has written of that whole life’s production – a writing life as strenuous, racked and self-questioning as any gaping aficionado of tortured genius might ask – in ways that support all the sensible things Barthes and Foucault ever said about the conditions and constraints of authorship. Not that Marr, who is a lawyer, an investigative journalist ...”

“... though, the essay tends to be more or less the precise opposite of such a sober and responsible self-examination. The writers who have used the form in the questioning spirit – the essayists, from Montaigne to Stanley Cavell, who generate a sense that the act of writing is for them a genuine process of intellectual exploration – are far outnumbered by ...”

“... of the human good, and its commitment to allow individuals to seek their own salvation or self-realisation provided they do not interfere with the same freedom of others. Unlike those French secularists who forbid Muslim girls to wear head-scarves to school, true liberals are reluctant to interfere even with anti-liberal cultures in their midst. This ...”

“... banned writers in an article on censorship. For some reason, Jack Whelan gave his new nationalised self a half-Irish, half-English moniker that would become, with time, entirely appropriate. Thus rechristened, O’Faolain did all the things an ambitious half-poor young man should do. He joined the IRA. He took to speaking Gaelic with a will. He spent his ...”

“... submitting to a more insidious censor. And if the wresting of autonomy from Nature entails self-repression, then the liberated individuals who emerge from this process are, in a woeful paradox, faceless, interchangeable figures drained of all inner richness. From what vantage-point, however, could Horkheimer and Adorno launch these Olympian ...”