“... is a theatrical approximation of The Hayes Court Sitting Room, an exploded view of the dandy’s self-enclosing urge to make a world against the world.As with des Esseintes, the point is to retreat into the interior, the better to find yourself elsewhere. The Hayes Court Sitting Room is partly the sitting room of Chaimowicz’s childhood in Paris. In some ...”

“... means. It is, after all, a zombie who is dying, a man who personifies an eerie sacrifice of the self to bureaucracy – or, less sympathetically, the use of bureaucracy as an enduring assertion of a controlling self. And this is why, in Living as in Ikiru, our hero dies a while before the end of the film.There are ...”

“... to the King. He was well-rewarded as a portraitist. Personally he was unprepossessing. This Self-Portrait (1813) sent to his brother in India shows a contained, serious concentration which fits with accounts of an outwardly shy man, who liked better to stand by than to join in. He suffered from periods of depression – one, when he was in his ...”

“... Dance. They play, perfectly, the classic Oedipal parts of brilliant bullied child and impatient, self-admiring father. And they lead us into those zones of the monster myth del Toro is most interested in: the tendencies of geniuses to be unhappy with success, of caretakers not to take care and the magical games truth can play with fact. There is an ...”

“... am large, I contain multitudes.’ Contemporaries of the poet picked up something of this self-contradiction, reflected in the fact that Dryden was, it seems, though a silent, withdrawn man, very decidedly loved and hated: sweetly commemorated by Congreve, beaten up verbally and physically by the Duke of Buckingham and others. When the poet Rochester ...”

“... opinion both of himself and of those of whom he approved or disapproved. Though, like other self-fashioners (Petrarch was his chief model among moderns), he altered and suppressed much in his letters when he published them, these letter-collections offer us a contemporary portrait unrivalled in its detail by any other. He found time to expound the ...”

“... background provides an unusual identity-humus. What he likes most about New York is its anonymity. Self-consciously nationalist intellectuals are often susceptible to cosmopolitanism: secretly (or in Said’s case openly) they feel most at home on the neutral terrain of exile and alienation. The very mechanism of identification – ‘standing up for’ a ...”

“... enthusiasm that this engendered, the association that arose then between German self-determination and liberalism and democracy, determined the political and cultural loyalties of the Jews of Austria thereafter – at any rate of the Jews of Western Austria. German-Austrian liberalism was, at the very least, their enemies’ enemy, an ally ...”

“... with shadows and changing reflections threaten the citizen’s most elementary weapon of self-defence: memory.’ Acutely and characteristically, he links passivity to unemployment, and the argument moves off from the dubious ‘politics of spectacle’ into the world Ascherson so insistently dissects, the one in which most people are without ...”

“... he was 21, the excuse for a course he probably would have followed anyway. Having invented a new self, made himself a changeling, he seized on the falsification attending his birth to slam the door of the past behind him for ever. Some years earlier, he had discovered that his mother’s first name was not Lilian, as she had pretended, but Letitia. Perhaps ...”

“... may or may not be activities of any consequence. This is what he has called a poet’s ‘virtuous self-mistrust’. His ‘September Song’, written to memorialise a child who died in the Holocaust, admits that vaunting and suffering may go together: (I have made an elegy for myself it is true) There are difficulties nonetheless with Hill’s enactment of ...”

“... is that he said the same sort of thing about others, while characteristically mingling it with self-disgust: ‘Back in London met Princess Bibesco and did not care for her much, her egoism is as tiresome and her appearance about as unprepossessing as my own.’ Evelyn Waugh being ‘our valued friend’, ‘it amused me to hear Peter laughing at ...”

“... by rewriting his letters for publication, a deft editorial feat which transformed whining self-pity into manly resolution. But he could hardly disguise the mutability of his religious allegiances. Educated by Jesuits, he switched to Lutheranism in 1572, when a professorship at Leiden offered him an escape from his troubled homeland. By 1575 he was ...”

“... literature then leaving the presses: he was rude, opinionated, intolerant, arrogant, egotistic, self-inflating, even megalomaniac. He could think and talk only of himself, one heard, refused to admit that he had ever made a mistake or that any of his plans developed in a way he had not foreseen, and arrogated to himself all credit for any success achieved ...”

“... rather briefly. He interprets Robinson Crusoe as being about the need to learn ‘moderation and self-restraint’ and the art of pursuing ‘ease and safety’. The ‘real crux of Crusoe’s moral sensibility’, Sill says, is ‘how to judge when to venture and when not to venture’. This, according to Sill, was also Defoe’s recipe for Britain’s ...”