“... addicts we pursue that entertainment to our detriment.On the one hand, Wallace’s thesis seems self-evident now that the United States’s economy has striated into white-collar and service-oriented jobs, and its major growth sector is the merged ‘industries’ of entertainment and communications technology; on the other hand, it’s more than a little ...”

“... indifferent to this misery, and that our daily thinking about our duty to others is marked by self-serving irrationality. We typically believe that we do have a moral duty to rescue others who are at risk, especially where this can be done without great cost to ourselves. For example, most people would agree that a bystander has a duty to rescue a child ...”

“... for enlarged state provision in all Western countries are now increasingly framed in terms, not of self-realisation and higher ends, but of consumer satisfactions and individualised private rights. A rather different range of binary contrasts, but one that similarly links timeless questions of theory to more concrete issues in social and constitutional ...”

“... their destruction. He, too, documents a sad tale of personal betrayal, compromised principle and self-deception, emplotting his own story as Clinton’s campaign aide, director of communications and senior adviser as an uneven, but ultimately friendship-shattering process of disillusionment with the man whose career he once so ardently forwarded. Where ...”

“... to Germany in two world wars, Joan of Arc and General de Gaulle are central to the French national self-image and F.D. Roosevelt is central to the story of America’s interwar economic recovery, and Nelson Mandela is central to South Africa’s new-found racial harmony. Exalted company for our two great heroes – but surely justified? Not according to the ...”

“... from the outset offering instruction on the difference between the essential and the existential self. This kind of thing must have been hard going for the audience, which had presumably come to hear about Shakespeare and wasn’t expecting Kierkegaard and the like; and it still doesn’t always seem very transparent on the page. The excuse for its first ...”

“... of the subterfuge for himself. The sense of dread he conveys is authentic – it is a loss of self, of connection to the world. Romand’s actions seem an extrusion of this vacuity, a radical kind of thoughtlessness. Yet Carrère largely eschews forensic speculation: had he presented Romand as a psychopath with obscurely Oedipal fears and a megalomaniac ...”

“... a lover of literature and a patron of the arts. But there his virtues ended. He was selfish, idle, self-pitying, cruel and unscrupulous. Nor were his brothers much better. Probably, as David Cannadine has written, the lives, loves and morals of George III’s children made them ‘the most unloved royal generation in English history’; though the previous ...”

“... like Philip Hensher (who twice rehashed Leavis’s line that the ‘set’ were not artists but self-publicists) and Waldemar Januszczak (‘Bloomsbury. Just tapping out these ten tedious letters has brought on a severe attack of RSI’). Yet in truth – to throw off my coat entirely – I find myself readily empathising with that last remark, more ...”

“... and how do we make descriptive and prescriptive distinctions between the inalienable components of self and the commodifiable bits of not-self? What are the rights and values pertaining to this ‘we’ whose configuration advances in biomedical science require us to decide on and even to enshrine in law? Who can alienate ...”

“... literary allusions, and yet barely a cadence or a phrase sounds derived. He seems as a poet not self-invented, which would be too knowing, but self-conceived. Like the idea of ‘new weather’, the title of his first extraordinary book, his poetry seems impossibly original. The End of the Poem attempts to show us how ...”

“... Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the 1960s generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal ...”

“... do not disappoint. They both present their works as spirited acts of defiance, therapeutic self-explorations, terrifically difficult journeys inspired by, of all things, mother-love: ‘After my son was born,’ Margaret Salinger writes, I felt an urgency to make my way through the magic and miasma alike, through both history and fiction, to figure ...”

“... wanted only this of herself, a woman who at her marriage was neither thoughtless nor completely self-effacing. Martha was a voracious reader of John Stuart Mill, Dickens and Cervantes, though her husband-to-be warned her against the rude bits unsuitable for a woman in Don Quixote. She was interested in music and painting, and had no shortage of ...”

“... discredit Coleman’s evidence by drawing attention to his past unreliability. But the judge, Ed Self, a George W. Bush appointee, would hear none of it. The revelations of Coleman’s unfitness for the job, his debts, his violent temper, his racism, weren’t permitted as evidence. One by one, the defendants fell. Donnie Smith was sentenced to 12 years in ...”