“... but none of them could be regarded as the foundation of all the rest, though a few self-confounding notions such as ambiguity, irony and the ideal of speaking ‘without authority’ are intrinsic to his work. It is also difficult to decide on an internal ranking among Kierkegaard’s works; you could choose any one of his writings and make it ...”

“... never one to avoid a stand-up row about points of principle. Plenty of Protestants rejoice in a self-consciously Lutheran tradition, especially Germans and Scandinavians, and they will be the ones most readily celebrating 1517, remembering 31 October as Reformation Day, a big annual event in Lutheran Germany. Very many Lutherans of German and Scandinavian ...”

“... book presents a continuation of other mighty endeavours: Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity and Jerrold Seigel’s The Idea of the Self, both studies in what it means to be an individual. In answer to this, the dwindling of trust in an immortal soul has shifted the onus onto the ...”

“... quietly. Instead he showed up for maulings in television studios and bombarded the world with self-justifying letters: yes, he had embellished his story here and there, because who would have listened otherwise? At least his intentions were pure, unlike those of his antagonists, who, he implied, had pounced on a few regrettable untruths in order to ...”

“... internment in Liverpool, she arrived in London in December 1942. When she died of tuberculosis and self-starvation in a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, on 24 August 1943, she had been separated from her parents for nine months. In London she wrote day and night, far exceeding the pedestrian reports the Free French asked her to produce. Her output in this period ...”

“... remarkable products of Counter-Reformation energy. The Jesuits have always been past masters at self-presentation – an aspect of their mission to communicate the Christian message as effectively as possible. Not least is the hagiographical narrative shaping the life of Loyola himself, a central moment of which was a personal disaster in 1521, when he was ...”

“... Rose, Ma. You have risen.This language is not poetic, but ridiculous, sententious, blinded by self-love and pirouetting over a chasm. Vuong trivialises his subjects by refusing to look at them directly, to describe them patiently; he seems not to trust the strength of his own material, or the perceptions of the reader. The occasional effective scene is ...”

“... Now it’s our mother’s link to life, her thread to safety from the labyrinth of the self. When it stops talking on the mantelshelf, that silence of significance will spread even to the newsless circles of our dead. The Fairy Flag I The fairy flag is in a frame like a picture white on white, like a fine tablecloth or shoulder-wrap too good to ...”

“... showing up like iron filings underneath the skin, then these must be the over-stuffed jeans of self-delusion, the ones with a zip that coyly exposes itself to the world, its handle peeping between distended denim flaps. In my wildest dreams I was never wearing them. I had on chaps. I tucked my Yahoo T-shirt into my gunbelt and walked around like ...”

“... none of this have surprised him? I can see him, sneering into his Terprin Hydrate, another fallen, self-lacerating ex-altar boy, third pew, centre aisle, at the Church of Eternal Damnation. A Valentine’s: Regarding the Impractibility of Our Love Evel Knievel, Robert Craig Knievel of Butte, now that one, that wild . . . The crack-up at Caesar’s Palace in ...”

“... day, shades drawn, two cats, writing these songs of tortured love, up to the tips of her waders in self-immolation, often keeping at it well into the night? Celine Dion, Cher, Michael Bolton, Faith Hill, Toni Braxton – knocking you back one after another, all morning and afternoon, at least until the men arrive after work. I don’t know why. Perhaps it has ...”

“... a jug. I leave a perfect heel print on a molehill. Green lips lick. These touchy chemicals have no self-control. Warm it with your ice-cold commentary. I see the brushwork and I read it back into the far, well-swept corners of her floor, the perspective of her path, the Shrove-tide overcast she glances at outside. One way or another, if you are a realist, you ...”

“... first reading of Black List, Section H was Stuart’s ability to deal with the notion of a damaged self, someone who was clearly weak, clearly wrong and who felt nothing but contempt for the world around him. I had come across these anti-heroic attitudes in other books, but this was an Irish self, and a man I had met, who ...”

“... Cromer, as parroted by a barrackroom sage or vainglorious subaltern, without the bland solvent of self-righteous statesmanship. In fact, they’re from Samuel Johnson’s first book, A Voyage to Abyssinia (1735), an excellent and little-noticed edition of which, by Joel Gold, appeared in 1985. They come at the conclusion of a distressing episode in which an ...”

“... hanging in the Hall of the Conciergerie the great tables of the Rights of Man, and with pride and self-esteem declared: “After all, it was I who did that.” But those tables proclaimed the rights of a man who could no more be the man of ancient society than his national-economic and industrial relationships could be those of antiquity.’ My aim is to ...”