“... information and entertainment. The combination of tireless philanthropy with unshakeable cultural self-assurance was not always endearing, but the members of this élite were, metaphorically and sometimes literally, the descendants of the Victorian ‘intellectual aristocracy’. Much of the cultural history of 20th-century Britain (and some of its political ...”

“... own conviction that statesmanship and trusteeship were intimately linked. It is this Curzon – self-important, fussy, but sensitive to beauty, romance and alien cultures – who is uppermost in David Gilmour’s splendid new biography. Gilmour punctures the myth of the insufferably arrogant and despotically ‘un-English’ Curzon perpetuated by society ...”

“... books, among them 13 novels, Prose is frighteningly good at portraying the fears, affectations and self-delusions of her protagonists: the roles they play to sustain themselves, and the roles they play in front of others. At faculty dinners she tells us that ‘Swenson cherished those moments’ when people misunderstood his wife’s jokes, ‘for making him ...”

“... acquiring the associated status of those who can wait an hour longer than others for their food. Self-nourishing and self-fashioning both happen at the table. The relationship between the powerful moral and ontological capacities of diet and the authority of dietary expertise isn’t new, but its texture has changed ...”

“... often in the earlier fiction) he can seem to betray himself, not in the sense of giving his true self away, but the reverse. He tends to present experiences close to his own life through an irony so thick that it could serve in the place of the traditional disclaimer that ‘Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.’ The ...”

“... assault and unlawful assembly. A columnist for the Oakland Tribune called the rioters ‘self-described anarchists’ and ‘wannabe Black Panthers’. The revolt in the aftermath of Grant’s murder is reminiscent of a bygone era in Oakland and other cities across the United States when black radicals enraged by police misconduct fearlessly ...”

“... of the piece is the negativism of fashionable thinking about the current state of England: healthy self-criticism, Allison objects, has become debilitating self-denigration. Chief offenders are those in the communications media for painting current affairs in the blackest colours. One industry whose decline Allison ardently ...”

“... worlds’ and that ‘a nascent culture of simulation is affecting our ideas about mind, body, self and machine.’ Moreover, she believes that the changes she is tracking, far from being isolated, are part of a general change in the way we live and think. The context in which the culture of simulation must be understood is that ‘of the eroding ...”

“... of influence with regard to early versions of yourself, as if, to twist Harold Bloom, your early self now played an insurmountably glorious Milton to your later romantic phases? Did Shakespeare say to himself: ‘No way I can beat Hamlet, so why write again?’ Jon Elster wrote two gems in the 1970s and 1980s, Ulysses and the Sirens and Sour Grapes. Not that ...”

“... a more illuminating form of reflective distance from our concepts and values through historical self-consciousness, which is an immersion in contingency. The history of philosophy itself is one part of this enterprise, and in Williams’s hands it becomes a subtle appreciation of ideas that may be fundamentally unlike anything we could think now, but that ...”

“... Some of Lawrence’s earliest paintings are self-portraits in the mould of Courbet – the painter as Artist. Latterly the role was deepened in its tragic aspect, the artist as Marsyas flayed. Lawrence’s gift to us, his perennial celebration of substance, richness, colour, the great blossoming of form – to use one of his own phrases – all in the name of painting, was never unattached from a sense of mortality ...”

“... In your average bookstore, the volumes stacked by the dozen and sold under the heading of Self-Help are liable to be found quartered in the same part of the building as those falling under the less obviously improving rubric of Philosophy. It’s a little hard to see why, in the present age, when Philosophy has wrapped its professionalism aloofly around it and sneaked off down the corridor into the seminar room, casting sufficient doubt as it retreats from view on the mere existence of a self to make the notion of Self-Help seem at best paradoxical and at worst inconceivable ...”

“... that feelings of crapness might be shooed away for ever by reading the right book. I’m talking self-help, auto-improvement, personal growth: the corner of the bookshop where sad-eyed people, credit card at the ready, are to be seen lifting down copies of Only One Shot: Aligning the Inner Soul with Action: How to Re-engineer Your Existence, Design a ...”

“... Wear palm leaf drapery Under the bam Under the boo Under the bamboo tree. Paul Gauguin, ‘Self-Portrait with Glasses’ (1903) For Sweeney, Gauguin’s women represent the crudest version of the myth of island bliss. But you don’t have to look long at Gauguin’s work (a retrospective is at Tate Modern until 16 January) to realise that bliss is ...”

“... to earlier and earlier writing, until there is little left that doesn’t speak, somehow, of self-renewal. Bradbury and Ruland maintain that American literature always has been and always will be ‘pre-eminently a modern literature’. Their history surveys the long march of self-renewals with the benevolent ...”