“... with extramission and loss, owes something to a childhood metaphysics about growth and the self. It is described very beautifully in a discussion about Hamlet and his dead father in the episode of Ulysses set in the National Library:—As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and ...”

“... of the Calvinist clergy: they could simply dispense with the clergy and keep their intellectual self-respect. The popular religion of the period was thus not so much anti-intellectual as anti-authoritarian: people wanted to think for themselves, follow their consciences and express their beliefs without inhibition. In this context, the ‘frightful grimaces ...”

“... institutions to their Roman source, Haecker saw Virgil as the inner pulse in Europe’s sense of self and destiny. In a different but related vein, and with Dante as central intermediary, the scholarship of Curtius and the criticism of Eliot extended this argument for Virgilian paternity. Our landscapes at evening, our manifold intimation of ‘town and ...”

“... within the framework of classical economics, in which it was assumed that market forces were self-regulating, and reached a point of equilibrium at full employment. His one major theoretical work, A Treatise on Money (1930), was an attempt to find a loophole, within the classical system, that would justify a job-creation programme of public ...”

“... novel of sensibility was the wasting of a morbid ‘finer spirit’ who could discover no second self in the world. (The genre always leaned toward epistle and monologue because the reader was required to become that self.) Yet the style of feeling which had supported the ambitions and consoled the anxiety of three ...”

“... implausible plotting only makes the act of employing a surrogate seem all the more arbitrary and self-indulgent. Each time the camera lingers lovingly on another tasteful detail of the family’s upper middle-class home, we wonder whether we are expected to fear for the heroine or resent her.Gloria Erlich’s new study of Edith Wharton also traces the dire ...”

“... would say, by exciting themselves they excite others. Like the higher pornography, the higher self-pity – vital to any bestseller – is an important ingredient in Larkin’s popularity. There is nothing specialised about the excitement. One does not have to share homoerotic feelings to be excited by Housman; or, when moved by Larkin, to share his ...”

“... to memorise a collection of words that included four terms of praise – ‘adventurous’, ‘self-confident’, ‘independent’ and ‘persistent’. A second group was asked to memorise a similar list except that the four positive words were replaced by ‘reckless’, ‘conceited’, ‘aloof’ and ‘stubborn’. Both groups then moved on to an ...”

“... back to explore the nature of the universe’) and Mary Lynn Broe (‘To discuss only Plath’s self-sufficient system of poetic devices – even her imaginatively textured combinations that move organically toward energy – is to indulge narcissistically a kind of contextualism with some blatant indifferences’). The militant feminists have raged against ...”

“... the story of a courageous and far-sighted but fatally flawed scoundrel, Vann; the account of self-defeating South Vietnamese corruption and ruthless indifference to military and political realities; and the history of American miscalculations and deceit in its longest war. In Sheehan’s skilfully constructed book, Vann is a metaphor for America’s ...”

“... is more than a chance echo, because both Benny and Maria have been listening to the same loopy self-help cassettes which offer ‘Affirmations and Actualisations’. The violence of their showdown in the final scene of the book exposes the terrible drive to power which such philosophies encode: to be in control of your own life, after all, you have to be ...”

“... mother when writing letters to her old school friends; they represent, to the daughter’s mind, self-conscious pleas for attention, powdery, pathetic appeals for love, for validation. She is enraged that her mother, who is dying slowly of a paralysing disease, can find the energy to pick up a pen and enter into a conspiracy with falsehood. ‘ “I have ...”

“... gin and laudanum, but he had himself made attempts to write a novel, full of maudlin masculine self-pity, entitled And the weary are at rest. In a lucid moment he wearily admitted that ‘composition’ required rather more than ‘the smoking of a cigar and the humming of a tune’. No, Emily was a solitary, although swaddled not unwillingly in the ...”

“... a concept of property which was ‘social’ rather than state or private, and a Gramscian view of self-managing civil society – as well as a commitment to ‘bourgeois’ liberties like political pluralism and parliamentary democracy. This was the elusive ‘Third Way’ – the alternative script which had been accumulating Communist rejection slips since ...”

“... pleasures of both recognition and novelty: we see people we know in fresh contexts. The reader’s self-congratulation may be checked as he encounters characters beyond his ken, but this provokes the humbling and enhancing awareness that the range of texts that might be called literary is now so vast that no one could ever experience more than a fraction of ...”