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“... original volume of selected essays, published 35 years ago, had the title Against the Self-images of the Age. The idea that we can live without truth is the current self-image he has set himself against. MacIntyre’s writings about truth, relativism, and the purpose of moral philosophy have been required ...”

“... of Christian morality. It was designed to lead to a society in which (so positivists claimed) self-development, personal inspiration and deluded notions of a bogus spiritual ‘transcendence’ would all give way to the more pressing, tangible and ‘selfless’ claims of wider humanity. The Invention of Altruism is ambitious in scope, and full of ...”

“... order, plot, signification.’ Even the best contemporary travel writing is haunted by the self-consciousness that grows out of this contradiction. It’s embarrassing to read about seemingly spontaneous encounters with exotic people in far-flung countries, and then suddenly to remember that the whole thing has been set up just so the author can ...”

“... the complexity of envisioned phenomena, and it surprised me to have it called luxuriant and self-indulgent; self-indulgent, surely, is what it wasn’t – other-indulgent, rather. My models were the styles of Proust and Henry Green as I read them (one in translation): styles of tender exploration that tried to wrap ...”

“... up with Jarrell’s familiar, clanging vulgarity, corny clichés, cutenesses, and the intolerable self-indulgence of his tear-jerking bourgeois sentimentality ... His work is thoroughly dated; prodigiousness encouraged by an indulgent and sentimental Mama-ism; its overriding feature is doddering infantilism.’ A few days after reading this, Jarrell cut his ...”

“... apparent beneficence of praise, performing with both an obligation to grandeur and a licence to self-indulgence. The grandeur is frequently impressive, the project kept up with remarkable stamina: but the self-indulgence, as well as weakening the structure, also undermines the confidence of the reader. Tournier is not a ...”

“... conventional. Chuck Jones falls somewhere in between. Until he won the Oscar this year only a few self-identified cartoon fans knew his name, but everyone knows the characters in the cartoons he directed and, in some cases, created at Warner Brothers between 1938 and 1962: the dapper rabbit from Brooklyn who, when confronted by the barrel of a rifle, munches ...”

“... Thus woe succeeds a woe; as wave a wave. The only thing missing from this aperçu is any touch of self-critical humour, as in Fuller’s ‘shopping list of fleshly ills’. What Fuller tends to comment on – though often with equal brevity – is, as a rule, less general, more personal, rueful and wise, but less incontrovertibly and complacently wise than ...”

“... an avuncular finger at her: I think it is neither better nor worse than other forms of psychic self-mutilation – but worse at the moment because it belongs to a culture so excessively self-absorbed, self-inflating and self-dramatising. Very like ...”

“... one calls this Nature or the creative imagination, the primary processes or the dark gods. The self runs down to unfathomably anonymous roots. Men and women emerge as unique beings through a medium (call it Geist, History, Language, Culture or the Unconscious) that is implacably impersonal. What makes us what we are has no regard for us at all. At the very ...”

“... stories, with essayistic detours’. That seems right. Sometimes there are invisible scare quotes, self-ironising or self-protective, around ‘Martin Amis’. At other times he seems to be addressing the reader in his own person. There’s no easy way of drawing a line, but the book’s unsettled relationship with ...”

“... circle at that time, so that s/he can place the two heavy volumes on a desk and be drawn into the self-satisfied philosophical benevolence and contempt for all received opinion and custom which inspired those young enthusiasts. We open them beside the solicitor’s clerk, Henry Crabb Robinson, who later recalled: ‘It made me feel more generously. I had ...”

“... as cheap and easy as fast food, or, more precisely, as a fast fast. In general, the rhetoric of self-improvement in America conceals an underlying drive to self-destruction, just as its narcissism masks a deeper nihilism. Like the book as a whole, this is quick, witty and largely unpersuasive. Indeed, there is such ...”

“... be the similarity of presentation in the placing of images on the paper, between, for example, the Self-Portrait of 1943, the famous Christian Bérard (to be shown only in facsimile) and the more recent portraits of lord Goodman (etched and drawn) – all of them with pillows, but only pillows, behind the figure. Less obviously noticeable will be how the nudes ...”

“... to Santayana, he points out, the book demonstrates, ‘in equal measure, candour and ignorance of self’. But he later announces that his own character ‘consists mainly of defects’, and the literary provenance of his book is, in part, Rousseauesque. Powered by the humour with which he learnt to defend his forlornness, the ...”