“... about what not to include – if in doubt, toss it in – and parts of this book come across as self-indulgent. In the book’s second section, as Sean goes to high school, it’s not particularly surprising that he becomes what those around him have told him all along he is: a first-class fuck-up. Dede lobbies to send him to boarding-school and eventually ...”

“... of structure which sometimes becomes merely lax. It may seem unfair to remark that there are self-indulgent passages of this kind in ‘Monday June 26th 1916’, since Strachey’s declared purpose there was to record the events of a single day, abjuring ‘selected realisms’ in the hope of capturing ‘its minuteness and its multiplicity and its ...”

“... a saint or cynic ever was    The theme of praise: a hermit would not miss Canonisation for the self-same cause,    And wherefore blame gaunt Wealth’s austerities? Because, you’ll say, nought calls for such a trial; Then there’s more merit in his self-denial. He is your only poet ... Perhaps. But during the ...”

“... new ‘germ-conscious generation’, fleeing from their fathers with the help of bicycles, eagerly self-improving, anxiously attempting to improve others. But stronger than this is Flora Thompson’s own sense of separation from what she is viewing. Her position as post-office assistant is similar to that of the governess in a Victorian novel: sober and ...”

“... Piers, whose identity exists to stage and shape that of others, finds his freedom from self in the dramatic energy of Vanbrugh, and so has the name nicked down to ‘Van’. The great house is sparsely populated by their great-grandfather, by his daughter-in-law (their grandmother), and by their pompous circumstantial uncle. Their widowed ...”

“... never understand her horror of falsity. How does a biographer, accustomed to delve for a buried self, relate to a person who presents herself directly, without a mask? First and Scott record the events and emotions of Schreiner’s life with minute fidelity, but the living, brilliant-eyed woman escapes yet another attempt to pin her down. Her openness ...”

“... progress is unlikely in principle to be both a clear and an uncontentious category of social self-understanding. Since it is such a global category and since what it aims to render more intelligible is the situation of societies in time, its significance is also always as much a matter of sentiment as it is simply one of causal understanding. To write ...”

“... his extreme credulity. Even Blake was sceptical of his fervent devotion to Richard Brothers, the self-appointed Prince of the Hebrews and Nephew of the Almighty, and to Joanna Southcott, the putative mother of the Messiah. None of this affected Sharp’s career, nor his ability to turn out masterly reproductive engravings of the best masters of his ...”

“... movies, style her hair, hang life-size posters of Kim Novak on her bedroom wall, plot her escape. Self-invention thrives in small spaces. Darling’s friend Jeremiah Newton recalled that ‘her pink bedroom held stacks and stacks of old magazines from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.’ It was so cluttered that when she later returned to visit she had to sleep in ...”

“... the fact that God says yes to sexuality, and so abandon ourselves to Total Loving and shuddering self-realisation in the ‘Big O’, we are in fact being taken for a ride, and riding each other, in talk. To start with, somewhere in the 18th century, this talk was straightforwardly scientific. The sexual was defined and cognitively confined into a specialism ...”

“... of Dutch art. In her book (and on its dust-jacket) there is a good colour illustration of a self-portrait and still-life painted by David Bailly of Leiden in 1651. A young artist (is it too ingenious to suggest that it represents Bailly himself as a young man?) holds Bailly’s portrait on a table where a wide variety of other works of art appear ...”

“... her father’s raping her, by the utter hopelessness of a family destroyed from within by its own self-loathing, is allowed to become ‘all of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed’. Pecola’s madness is a form of flight; a form Morrison can explain but does not condone. A murderous ruthlessness becomes an alternative form of flight in ...”

“... and order can be constructed but on the ways in which they can be shown to be fractured and self-refuting. It is this – the systematic privileging of disorder and a concomitant scepticism about the ways in which received authority has constituted itself – which characterises all the movements and ideas grouped as Post-Structuralism. Barbara ...”

“... a man who pleased himself. If he could at the same time please others he would. His selfishness, self-absorption, and truth-to-self were all aspects of a belief in unmediated response. The implication in sculptural terms was that the veil of style would hide truth if one did not dedicate oneself to the observation of ...”

“... answer to her father’s vision in the field of corn; it’s also a chilling expression of the self-destructive passivity of consumerism upon which the business-religion of The Propheteers feeds. Max Apple (whose name sounds as though it might have been dreamt up by C.W. Post in a vegetarian clean-up operation on fiction) has written a fascinatingly ...”