“... 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 ...”

“... because the tales themselves can be fairly anodyne. Biff, bash, lolly, champagne, nick. Little self-reflection. Most criminals would think self-reflection was a design fault in a pair of Raybans. Reynolds has avoided these pitfalls because he has managed some self-reflection during his ...”

“... awareness among the other Chilean students of its psychological aftermath, makes Richard’s self-obsession seem rather pathetic, but Tóibín chooses not to offer the reader a moment even of denied awareness on his part. One section ends with a fellow student’s account of Raul’s torture: ‘He told them the names of his grandparents first, they were ...”

“... computer. Whichever of Warner’s observations and feelings and desires survived this rhetorical self-slaughter, they will come to us only after they have passed through Morvern’s idle and careless hands. After weeping a bit, and warming her knickers over the kettle, and going to the toilet, ‘remembering always to wipe backwards’, Morvern decides to ...”

“... enthusiast for pretentious sentences and bogus science, and someone who whinged with unattractive self-absorption about the difficulty of writing anything, when no one was asking him to anyway. But what makes ‘Chatwin Revisited’ an honest homage and not just an assassination is its author’s unillusioned estimation, as a fellow travel-writer, of his own ...”

“... traditions and slowly evolving customs’, and whose motto is ‘Love Thy Neighbourhood as Thy Self.’ Ethnically obsessed and stiflingly conformist, Communitaria is North American identity politics at its most Stalinistic: all cultures deserve equal respect, none can be criticised by another, and the self is rigorously ...”

“... of their Society, and only when that Society had been radically transformed, and the original self-determination of the human species restored to all its members, would such symptoms of social disease be eradicated. Emile Durkheim took account of neither Peuchet nor Marx in his celebrated Suicide of 1897, a chilly work which claimed to document ‘social ...”

“... at first offered Grieve merely a convenient alter ego through whom he might enjoy the pleasures of self-contradiction. Grieve had, earlier that year, written savagely about the ‘infantilism’ of Scottish vernacular poetry, pouring particular scorn on writers so distanced from their own cultural roots that they had to glean their vocabularies from ...”

“... great, leonine head of curls tilted above Dostoevsky’s Idiot’. Mary is shocked at Meredith’s self-assurance, since after all she is ‘somewhat chubby and very oddly dressed’, but quickly warms to her sophisticated literary knowledge and all-round brilliance. They form a friendship ‘based almost entirely on indolence, a monastic passion for doing ...”

“... often know, human interaction is too complex for mimicry. Sinedu also taped hours of rambling self-questioning. She mailed long confessional letters to complete strangers, some of which were turned over to Harvard by the recipients; Harvard filed them away. ‘I hadn’t admitted her to my class because the writing she had submitted was ...”

“... only has he made a canny foray into organic groceries: he has developed what might be called his self-esteem. Another marital bust-up hasn’t done for him: he has lived in the States, the land of eternal optimists, serial marriers and career opportunists. ‘Transparency, efficiency, virtue, convenience and flexibility’ are his keywords, and though he ...”

“... of visionary beauty, of a yearning or pressurised lyricism which will, despite their estranged and self-estranging contexts, constitute the first-time reader’s most familiar point of entry. Such moments may also provide their most compelling inducements to read on: No resolve about places, the latch-key to our drifting lives, seems relevant without this ...”

“... translating them into our own system of numerals. So who has more number smarts, the present-day self-styled innumerate or the mathematically gifted German student from five hundred years ago? Brian Butterworth, a cognitive psychologist who has done much work on the neural and cognitive bases of mathematical thinking, says it’s a tie. The thesis of The ...”

“... literary, philological presumptions. But which faculties? Young and happy and a touch self-important, we decided it didn’t much matter. People who were interested would tell each other, would get to hear of it and come along.But now we hit a snag. Out of the blue and what will seem very late in the day, Iris said it would help her compose her ...”