“... generation’ believed, as he did, that the old ways of getting educated and finding one’s true self had failed, but they didn’t share his peculiar interests or match the scope and eccentricity of his reading. Isherwood, though always a friend, distanced himself physically and spiritually. Chester Kallman, though himself the cause of much, mostly ...”

“... all the suggestions offered by all the great dead philosophers. Since philosophy became self-consciously professional, the first task has usually been disdained as ‘mere’ edification. The analytic philosophers take on the second assignment, and congratulate themselves on their ‘scientific’ devotion to truth, hardness of nose, and sheer ...”

“... Her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged promote, as Rand put it, a ‘morality of rational self-interest – or of rational selfishness’. The central tenets of her politics, hatred of anything that could be construed as self-sacrifice and cruelty towards the helpless, are the exact inverse of the worship of ...”

“... market hypothesis, which requires that asset prices reflect all available data and that a self-regulating financial sector will converge on the correct pricing of risk, is quite the punt given that just over a decade ago the global financial crisis proved definitively that the EMH is the mother of all grifts. As Karl Polanyi wrote in 1944, ‘to ...”

“... because Sinclair, living in interesting times, contrived to spend most of her days in self-imposed isolation. She called herself a monist, a seeker after Absolute Reality. She abhorred Bertrand Russell’s ‘realism’ and William James’s pragmatism. She thought ‘real life’ existed only in annihilating moments of perfection, brought on by ...”

“... Literary theory is in love with failure. It looks with distaste on whatever is integral, self-identical, smugly replete, and is fascinated by lack, belatedness, deadlock, self-undoing. Works of literature catch its attention once they begin to come unstuck or contradict themselves, when they unravel at the edges or betray an eloquent silence at their heart ...”

“... as mysteriously autonomous, conjuring themselves up from their own unfathomable depths. They were self-originating, self-determining, carrying their ends and raisons d’être within themselves. As such, art was a secular version of the Almighty. Both God and art belonged to that rare category of objects which existed ...”

“... which will take us to his death, aged 54, in 1795. Perhaps the strut is becoming a waddle. The self-absorption and mediocrity of mind remain unabated, but he says that he’s ‘not so greedy of great people as I used to be’. This didn’t mean passing up the particular social opportunity then on offer, and later, when Mr Ramus the King’s page invited ...”

“... crisis of knowingness in the culture’. And it is knowingness as a fundamental form of self-deception that is the abiding preoccupation of the 12 essays that make up this book: our minds as always already made up, rather than always in the making. We are suffering, in effect, from prejudice and dogmatism and not from our own nature. Desire is not ...”

“... had a phenomenal digital gift, a perfect memory, a very high intelligence, but in addition he was self-conscious and self-observant to an extent most other performers would scarcely be able to imagine. This was not just a matter of takes and re-takes of everything he played, but also of imagining and thinking about himself ...”

“... And now, here she is, prefacing her own stories. ‘How to do this without sounding pompous or self-pitying or dying and doomed? . . . Could she imply illness and get sympathy? A mysterious malignancy on, say, the writing arm?’ Moore was born in 1957 and has been unusually successful, commercially and critically, since she was quite young: she won a ...”

“... blame for the character of those actions. But this, Strawson argues, requires that humans be truly self-determining – that their actions and all the features of character that influence their actions be determined by themselves – and this is impossible. It is impossible, not because of the way the world happens to be, but because it doesn’t make any ...”

“... gives full and overdue attention. Lawrence’s enemies still deny his comedy, which was often self-deprecating. John Carey, who wants all writers to be nice (ideally, as decent as Arnold Bennett), wrote a book about the nastiness of various modern writers called The Intellectuals and the Masses. In it Lawrence is scolded for his ‘fascism’, his ...”

“... was not consciousness as such. Montaigne still thinks, and knows that he thinks, but his actual ‘self’ is bound up with his rapidly diminishing sensorium. As Daniel Heller-Roazen argues in his rich and elegant book, a more enigmatic formulation of the sense of self than we are used to was still at work in the 16th ...”

“... The creation of identity, the invention and re-invention of the self, is as emblematic of the modern era as technological invention. Of the many revolutions our species has witnessed in the last two centuries, the one which has probably contributed most to the development of the ‘plastic’ self has been the process by which, in the West, family size has been permanently reduced ...”