“... most famous, but there are many others: sometimes evidently foolish, sometimes worryingly lucid; self-righteous or ‘humble’; piously outraged or alarmingly dispassionate. None of them speaks for Swift. Readers have often imagined the author’s fury or disgust or horror, but without actually hearing his voice. And yet, at the end, he seemed to declare ...”

“... flows unstaunchably. Though we repress this trauma, it persists within us as the hard core of the self. Something is missing inside us which makes us what we are, a muteness which resists being signified but which shows up negatively as the outer limit of our discourse, the point at which our representations crumble and fail. Lacan’s infamous ...”

“... force of productive development for ‘the cunning of reason’ and the struggle of Geist to self-knowledge and self-realisation. Cohen, defending a ‘technological determinist’ interpretation of Marx, takes this line, referring to what he describes as ‘the identity of structure across diversity of ...”

“... the legend. He did the first in the usual, recognisably Victorian way, from scratch, with terrific self-confidence, huge energy, astute focus and ferocious determination. He did the second by exploiting a singular gift for self-publicity: introduce a journalist and Edison would produce a soundbite. Some of them slid straight ...”

“... to appear in Blast. Lewis thought that people had had enough of all that. They did not want self-effacement. They wanted brilliant fellows like him performing stunts and letting off fireworks. ‘What’s the good of being an author if you don’t get any fun out of it?’ Ford told this story several times in several different ways, each time effacing ...”

“... functions of nothing but custom and superstition and the ovine docility of a populace that lets self-appointed language authorities boss them around. Unmoved by the cavils of the likes of Steven Pinker, who claims that usage rules ‘survive by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations’, Wallace is aghast at the state of American ...”

“... discarded – and so should the assorted defeats and dead ends derived from it. This year’s The Self Awakened tries to help the left further down the road, and no doubt Free Trade Reimagined, due soon, will be another phase of his unstoppable campaign. Unger speaks primarily about the left and what it should do, but the old right finds itself in a ...”

“... he is permanently marooned among the savages. Tom Brodzinski, the protagonist or victim of Will Self’s satirical nightmare The Butt, meets a comparable fate. On holiday on an imaginary post-colonial island continent, Tom decides to give up smoking, and, distracted by the sense that for once he is ‘Doing the Right Thing’, flicks his final fag-end from ...”

“... who manhandles both the world and other people: Audrey Litvinoff in The Believers – abrasive, self-deceiving, mordant, furious. The novel opens in 1962, at a party in London, where 19-year-old Audrey Howard, the child of Polish Jewish immigrants, a secretary with an angry reserve and a nearly crushing sense of her own ignorance, watches Joel ...”

“... appropriately snowy image. He imagines himself as an intrepid Arctic explorer, but this parallel self is still too active, and soon the narrator is a statue, stuck in shit. That there are two ways of describing the moment suggests that Zeller has something deeper in mind. Will metaphors do instead of action? Are they just pretentious? Can any description ...”

“... repertoire of tricks and mannerisms that were ‘almost caricatures, some of them, of his natural self’, rather than expressions of the character he was playing. He was, in short, a ham, and a self-centred one at that. (When Ellen Terry suggested that she might defy convention and wear black rather than white in ...”

“... The taboo on graffiti reflects characteristically modern ideologies of cleanliness and bodily self-control. The taboo on marginalia, however, reveals a new model of reading. Our culture celebrates receptivity, a willingness to be marked by texts; in early modern England, though, this would have looked more like passivity, a failure to make a mark. In the ...”

“... great sophistication about the worrisome possibility that their visions and prophecies might be self-induced, self-validating or self-deceiving. Nicole Oresme, one of the greatest medieval mathematicians and philosophers, thought that most visionary experiences were the result of ...”

“... like a protest made from behind a teenager’s slammed door. How are we supposed to read Arvid’s self-absorption? Is his character the object of the novel’s analysis, or does he more straightforwardly embody the novelist’s own sensibility and intentions? The book amounts to one long accusation, directed at his mother, his wife, his brothers (who hover ...”

“... was larger than the party and therefore beyond the party’s immolations, its self-stabbings,’ she thinks. She knows what’s going to happen, so we don’t get to hear the actual proceedings of the show trial that follows: there is none of the rhetoric, or the dialogue. Rose dismisses it all as ‘droning insinuation’, and walks out ...”