“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... officials regarded Morgenthau as a barbarian and believed that a policy of revenge would be self-defeating as well as nauseating. Even Americans such as Jackson – Bradley Smith notes – recognised that public opinion in a democracy can change with astonishing speed. The very people who demanded that the pips should squeak would be among the first to ...”

“... ghost-write her autobiography. That project came to naught – Carstairs was resistant to any real self-examination – but the tapes convinced Summerscale that even after this ‘self-made man’ had retreated from the public eye, she longed for applause and commemoration:I imagined that Joe Carstairs hoped on her death to ...”

“... nothing in common with the prose of real life,’ and the paradox of Eugene Onegin is that it is self-confessedly a poem simultaneously of real life and of pure fiction. These stanzas that select so much of the real constantly remind us of the fictive status of those selections – fictive because they have been so carefully selected, so artistically ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it is a simple escape from personality, and, as a model for poetry, much closer to a fetishistic self-fashioning than it is to ascetic self-abnegation.’ He writes that a number of poems in Gunn’s second volume, The Sense of Movement (1957), are no longer poems of the wounded or divided ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... later shaken and depleted, but optimistic in the belief that depression in most cases was ‘self-limiting’ and eventually runs its course ‘until the victim comes out the other end of his nightmare more or less intact. In the meantime, however, it’s Auschwitz time in the heart of the soul – a form of madness I wouldn’t wish upon a literary ...”

“... talking to me like that gave me a sense of importance. Of significance. Of inner growth. Self-awareness was born. I began to take myself seriously.’ The turbot, who speaks the spare dialect of the Baltic coast, ‘a language of few words, a wretched stammering that [names] only the strictly necessary’, begins his passage through Grass’s book as ...”

“... intuitions, omens, dreams, haunted places, &c, &c.’ In and out of poems, Hardy apprehends the self as one of those spectres:For my part, if there is any way of getting a melancholy satisfaction out of life it lies in dying, so to speak, before one is out of the flesh; by which I mean putting on the manners of ghosts, wandering in their haunts and taking ...”