“... but in the persuasion that poetry involves a distortion of a natural human ambition of linguistic self-fulfilment, and that poets delude themselves in feeling that they attain a verbal serene above the murk of commonplace articulateness, and that they obstruct the general vision of human linguistic potentialities with the appearance of doing so. In the ...”

“... picture, a whole crowd. It is a poignant moment for she has quickly come to find her outed self similarly indistinct, not comfortable in any group nor yet identifiable as an individual. After hanging around for a while as a ‘moll’ to the dangerously unpleasant Dominic Elwes and enduring an unwanted pregnancy, Tennant decides to give in, to conform ...”

“... classical cosplay over psychological penetration. But one aspect of Kauffman’s work – her self-portraiture – still speaks vividly to viewers. Kauffman GalleryOn entering the RA show, the visitor encounters two self-portraits, both painted when she was in her forties, that explore different sides of Kauffman’s ...”

“... to manage’ her disabling feelings of guilt and shame. She saw shame as ‘peculiarly unsuited to self-expression’ and so sought herself in allegories and fantastic stories, in sin-eating monkeys and feisty cats. She also saw herself, or found herself, in essays by Nuar Alsadir, Carolee Schneemann and Denise Riley, in a novel by Jean Rhys and a poem by ...”

“... deconstructor, is the quixotic nature of trying to represent in language the ‘presence’ of the self and the world. Representation tries to pass itself off as a token of that presence, but the fact that we need a substitute only dramatises the inadequacy of the representation. The language we use to express ourselves and the world is finally what prevents ...”

“... dedication to Rochester, however – a document of such laboured oiliness and such particularised self-abasement that even the most hardened connoisseurs of Drydenian toadying might be expected to find it unusual: Dryden himself called it an ‘ill Dedication’, but only in a further sycophantic admission of unworthiness. Shadwell, who had called Dryden ...”

“... Neither claim is ever quite substantiated. He admits, over and over again, that he was an entirely self-obsessed child, but it is as if even as an adult he has never asked anyone else about their mother, or wondered if they had one too. Having a mother comes to him as a uniquely astonishing phenomenon. But although immensely ...”

“... character lies the spirit of liberty: liberty not as the lawlessness of the anarchic French or the self-realising Geist of the high-minded Germans, but liberty as the right to be cussedly, bloody-mindedly oneself. ‘John is John,’ as Tony Blair wryly murmured of John Prescott when he punched a demonstrator, suggests something of this tautological ...”

“... human beings are genuinely disposed to co-operate with each other for reasons other than self-interest, and to explain how such behaviour could have evolved under the conditions in which our anatomically and psychologically modern ancestors lived for many tens of thousands of years. Altruists are people who do things that benefit other people at a ...”

“... not talk about it in the right kind of way. The same applies to Proust on the subject of time. Self-deception is a philosophical issue, but it would be hard to imagine Peter Strawson or A.C. Grayling writing about bourgeois false consciousness. Power doesn’t really count as a philosophical concept, if one leaves aside political theory; but even if it ...”

“... autobiography, The Words, likewise aims explicitly to peel away layer after layer of hypocrisy and self-deception and to shape his legend – all the while deriding his efforts to do so. Anyone undertaking to write Sartre’s biography therefore faces an unusual challenge. What new ground could one possibly break in studying a life so thoroughly documented by ...”

“... scribbles and Molly Bloom muses. For many male novelists, like the Austrian Robert Musil, erotic self-metamorphosis becomes mystical, a kind of religious substitute. The sphinx has her mystery, but in the final and most subtle analysis it is that of having no secret at all. One of Musil’s most memorable passages, a kind of essay reverie, describes his ...”

“... recently won fame with Autumn Journal, which – for all its documentary vividness – is hugely self-absorbed. The letter to Dodds was sent in wartime, when everybody was writing a will, but with MacNeice the disposition to self-scrutiny ran deep. He called it his ‘personal fixation’ and from time to time he tried to ...”

“... with superior status and political rights (more or less) for its male citizens, elements of self-government and leaders supervised by the political community. But this is the ideal type. The ‘polis’ could be a whole society, including women, or the male citizens exclusively. And Greeks could use the word to refer to any urban settlement, from a ...”

“... may be one factor in his sometimes vertiginous shifts between giddy amorousness and starchy self-protection. Crawford handles with equanimity the challenges presented by these tonal shifts. In this second volume he deals with a difficult period of Eliot’s life for a biographer. As his fame grew, Eliot’s wariness expanded along with it, and his ...”