“... Geller had given him a mind-expanding reading list of what we would now recognise as New Age self-help books. Elvis had read them all, performed all the meditations, but didn’t feel the light, not in mind, body or soul. The fire refused to descend; his spiritual air remained a vacuum. Now, on the plush customised tour bus, Geller was thrown by how ...”

“... women, felt driven to sketch his extraordinary personality. Koestler himself wrote several mordant self-analyses. Scammell from time to time interjects his own ideas on what – his neglectful mother, his inner conflict over his Jewishness in anti-semitic Central Europe – made Koestler so pugnacious, so insufferably competitive, so tyrannical and ruthless ...”

“... precocity here takes a cultural form that was central to Spender’s own habitual confidence or self-importance. And the second is that, as a writer, Spender was, as he sometimes acknowledged, a constant autobiographer. In World within World, his first formal autobiography, published when he was only 42, he contrasted himself with those of his poetical ...”

“... her father and Tancredi, she has neither the intelligence nor the extraordinary, almost abstract self-esteem that the old Leopard has. Lampedusa treats her harshly. Her fondest possession is her father’s dog, stuffed after its death, and the novel ends with her sudden discovery of the ‘inner emptiness’ that the dogskin symbolises: As the carcass was ...”

“... which she had read before she was nine. She also read Jack London’s Martin Eden, a book about a self-taught writer which she later suspected had given her inspiration for her future life. A schoolteacher called Mr Starkie, recognising an unusual capacity in the girl, lent her The Sorrows of Young Werther. She started keeping a diary when she was 12. She ...”

“... we draw the line between dress and costume, between life and art? Edith Sitwell was made to feel self-conscious about her appearance as a child. As an adult she made sure that everyone else would be conscious of it too; this was dress as the performance of personality. My thoughts about women and their clothes, how they wear them and also how they write ...”

“... he was pre-eminent among British psychoanalysts.I don’t think that living through an artificial self, which is what had got me into such an awful mess, is all that uncommon. The condition is difficult to recognise because it is concealed from the world, and from the subject, with ruthless ingenuity. It does not feature in the standard catalogue of neurotic ...”

“... and takes the shaman route of older beliefs. Once, in a train derailment, I bore my sense of self so lightly it yearned for those middle heights. Probably, when dying, we rise above and see nurses acting in perfect democracy. We’ll not romanticise shamans; but whatever our job or class there can always be some dream train where we’re squashed in by ...”

“... their love is pure, as pure as I’d wish the daughter-love to be in a Britain from which I’m self-exiled. This is the night of the eclipse: by 12.30 a thumb print blurs half the moon, and something restless and unachieved follows me through sleep. The roar of the garbage truck wakes me up and releases through my window screen the ill smell of the weekend ...”

“... to branch as the boat slides past, but silent, like a person who has learned to do without the self as worthy foe, settling, instead, for something in the night that tracks him from afar, some faint device unspooling in an empty Nissen hut, the data insufficient to predict a future he could happily imagine, no universal constant, no dark matter, only a ...”

“... the story told again, without this subject crouched in the midst of it all: the hangnail self adopted for a while, and then discarded. There must be songs for this, and minerals the body takes for granted, shifts and pulls that might have wandered elsewhere, were they not so battened down; and, even if nothing comes, as we disembark to goods and ...”

“... personal wholeness? a congerie of chemical elements? of truths held self-             evident? – how do I see them? – to be alive,             is it             to be             faithful? to be an arch, a list, a suddenly right ...”

“... Vanishing act – through dowel-holes in the wreck – Into bottles but without a message, only Self-effacement in sand, additional eddies. There’s no such place as heaven, so let it be The Carricknashinnagh shoal or Cahir Island where you honeymooned in a tent Amid the pilgrim-fishermen’s stations, Your spillet disentangling and trailing off Into the ...”

“... in the know. We didn’t expect ‘thistle seed’ to be thistle seed but we did expect to feel self-satisfied, maybe even smug. It wasn’t meant to be at all like this when we stared into the ...”

“... see me as theproject I am for this planet, earth, the one who needs work, accursed, material, my self, myone singular war memorial, my own native land, temporary, what shall I search for in thecity of searches, part of the circuitry in here with you, animated, these are not actualwords, they come out as integers you track, where are the crumbs, where are the ...”