“... and taking him back to Haddam for a year or two. To this end, he packs a copy of Emerson’s Self-Reliance and tries to work up seasonal pep talks ‘under the syllabus topic of “Reconciling Past and Present: From Fragmentation to Unity and Independence”’. Frank also has a rubric for this stage of his life, ‘a time I think of as the Existence ...”

“... a political grouping nor a social stratum, the mass denoted a pathological orientation of the self. Arendt claimed that its members had no interests, no concern for their ‘wellbeing’ or survival, no beliefs, community or identity. What they had was an anxiety brought on by loneliness, ‘the experience of not belonging to the world’, and a desire to ...”

“... had carved into the walls of the castle, he was an arriviste; though whether one regarded him as a self-serving upstart intolerably ornamented with the privileges of his betters, or as a bold new talent who might be capable of securing a Protestant succession against the popish corruption of the older nobility, depended on one’s allegiance. In 1575, the ...”

“... based on a different kind of inner discipline, a confrontation of the conflicting desires in the self, and a willing dispossession which comes close to Gandhi’s ideas of passive or non-violent resistance. Those who have been the objects of exclusion and derision are already freer, Woolf suggests, from the ‘unreal loyalties’ that prompt ...”

“... based on class. This is reflected in every aspect of their branding, packaging, advertising and self-image: Marks & Spencer’s is very middle-class, Sainsbury’s is middle-class, Tesco is careful to track the aspirations of the British mass market, and Asda is more like its former, cheap-but-cheerful self than it is ...”

“... no pudeur about expressing his resentments or his enthusiasms. To a casual teenaged visitor his self-centredness was somehow much more sympathetic than it sounds when recorded in cold print. But it was wearing to live with, not least for himself.Why was Sassoon like this? In the public mind he remained not only one of the most celebrated poets of the Great ...”

“... Spender, Auden and Day-Lewis), a composite creature marked by its blend of glib Marxism, shameless self-advertising and large quantities of indifferent verse. As the popular label for the period suggests, Auden was from the start the dominating presence, and poetically he increasingly came to be seen as being in a class of his own. MacNeice was, in ...”

“... comedy riff the bell jar of a borrowed literary aesthetic. Despite the focus on reclusion and self-sacrifice, the book becomes close to overexcited when the subject is sociable, magnetic, preposterous Abravanel. It isn’t easy for a caricaturist to master watercolour. Why should he try? The techniques are hardly complementary. When Abravanel is the ...”

“... Shoes are literally fetishised by the extraordinary Bruno Schulz in his pictures of crouching, self-abasing men – self-portraits often – excruciated with desire at the feet and elegant shoes of fancy women holding whips or with their noses in the air. Unworldly Yeshiva boys and alarmed young Hassids encounter pairs ...”

“... origins in New England Puritanism, and the premium it placed on the individual’s powers of self-examination. In a number of the ‘contrarian’ essays collected in The Death of Adam (1998), Robinson mounts a vigorous defence of the Puritans and their legacy, and she shares with Reverend Ames an abiding respect for the most influential early theorist ...”

“... that have come about since the publication of Modern Ireland. This is not only because they are self-evidently part of a shift towards the tolerant pluralism that any self-respecting liberal must welcome (and even any self-respecting conservative – it would be hard to find anyone in ...”

“... a zone of languorous, ineffectual, hedonist, perfumed sensuality, tinged with godlessness and self-indulgent materialism, decadent, unmanly. In short, it is deserving of conquest and rule by the capable, virile energies of Western bureaucrats. This variegated history is told in The Persian Sensation: ‘The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’ in the West, at ...”

“... republican institutions is far deeper, more insidious, because it rests on the popular delusion of self-government and independence.’ However much she yearned to see the anarchist movement grow out of its enfeebling isolation, she refused to violate her principles by engaging in the political process. ‘Universal suffrage,’ Proudhon had said, ‘is the ...”

“... and intellectualist Broch wrote in that mid-century Eliotic way of the poems’ ‘suppression of self’. Indeed, their experiential component was close to zero: they had no calories – but they made the reader feel warm. They had no smell, but they were perfume all right. So distant and numinous were they that finding anything as vulgar as titles for them ...”

“... many were clerics. Men of science were seen as uniquely virtuous, given to stoic fortitude and self-denial in the service of truth, not material gain, public fame or political power. By the 18th century, the centralised nation-state gave systematic institutional forms to the mobilisation of technical expertise. In the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a ...”