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“... to be known. It is we who know them, because we know at least something about them: that they are self-ignorant. They are rich cavities, into which we pour a kindly offering: if we are the only ones who can provide the knowledge they lack about themselves, then we ourselves have become that lack, have become a part of them. V.S. Naipaul’s Mr Biswas belongs ...”

“... with questions of identity. His brutally penetrating intelligence, as well as the instinctive self-confidence of an aristocrat, were always running incredulously up against the fact of existence, and the certainty of non-existence. What and who was he at different moments of the day? One of his earliest attempts at writing is a history of 24 hours, a ...”

“... According to John Constable, the trouble with self-taught painters was that they had such bad teachers. Creative writing workshops notwithstanding, every novelist is self-taught. An enduring reminder of this is Cervantes’s relationship with his equivocal double masterpiece Don Quixote, and the most persuasive analyst of both book and author remains E ...”

“... that simple repression, a massive and motivated forgetting, cannot contain them. Pieces of the self need to be created that can function autonomously, thereby fencing off forbidden memories from the self as a whole. This claim about the aetiology of multiple personality took shape in 1973, the year of the publication of ...”

“... Gauguin. He aimed for an art that proclaimed something beyond the fixed and knowable. Whether self-possessed Tehamana was also the model for the submissive and carnal ‘Tehura’, whose features Gauguin carved at a similar date, is impossible to tell: turn the block round, anyhow, and a figurine carved on the back morphs Tehura into Eve in ...”

“... a Quilted Sleeve in the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery (until 18 May) makes sense as a self-portrait. The bearded young man looks over his shoulder towards you as an artist would who had turned from canvas to mirror. There are also two undoubted self-portraits here. The Berlin picture (from the mid to late ...”

“... Lowell studies, in the same way that a prince of the blood might become absorbed, without either self-consciousness or false modesty, in compiling an intimate dynastic chronicle. The word ‘Lowell’ occurs and recurs in the same spaciously necessary way. The poet’s father wears his ‘oval Lowell smile’ as naturally as a Hapsburg his lip; and there is ...”

“... creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out,’ she wrote in 1971, ‘what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction’ (‘When We Dead Awaken’). Women’s task in advancing its end was simple, brutal and clear: ‘As women, we have our work cut out for us.’ Rich often speaks of ‘survival’ and of feminism as a ‘struggle for ...”

“... This was tactful understatement. She was susceptible to indignation, and to arrogance, self-pity, hypocrisy, histrionics and hypochondria as well. It is hard to write about her even sympathetically without seeming hostile. The more a biographer tells – and the more she cares about her subject, the more she can tell – the worse the story ...”

“... often within their families, which he hoped could lead to collective good health. To this self-help approach, he sometimes admitted the additional need for an ‘inflow of super-personal help’ – usually some form of access to religious experience. He was wary of new public measures for regulating wellbeing – the emergent institutional spaces and ...”

“... does? Or is it, as Mark Lilla puts it in The Once and Future Liberal, ‘a pseudo-politics of self-regard and increasingly narrow and exclusionary self-definition’? The book belongs to the genre of responses to Donald Trump’s election in which liberal American academics turn their rage on their own ...”

“... repressed, yet given to displays of flamboyant suffering – to public and extreme fasting and self-denial, to the exhibition of torn and bleeding flesh. Her behaviour recalled the gruesome penitential practices of her medieval foremothers and resembled that of the ‘hysterics’ of her own day, whose case histories promoted the careers of ...”

“... much as a spur to new achievements. His early poems revolve about subjectivity in an appropriately self-absorbed way: ‘I am made up of an intensest life,/Of a most clear idea of consciousness/Of self,’ he thought out loud in his first published work, Pauline (1833), a visionary monologue notionally addressed to a ...”

“... both protects and inhibits, and ‘has yet to shatter’. A more overtly intense confluence and self-alienation occurs in the superb title-poem of Muldoon’s new collection, in which he imagines an encounter between the chief of a Red Indian tribe and some British military colonists: We met the British in the dead of winter. The sky was lavender and the ...”

“... and which are not always easy to tell apart. Which is the one that has litost – a form of self-pity – and which is the one that has ‘unbearable lightness of being’? Which of these two conceptions, for that matter, we may even sometimes wonder, is which? His fertility, narrative gift, gift for experiments and impromptus, are such as to bewilder ...”