“... Smollett, always a Tory critic of commercial ‘progress’, was sick and disenchanted, living in self-exile in Italy. It is always supposed that Bramble’s disgust was also Smollett’s. Yet the form of the fiction says: ‘take your choice.’ Either, here is every absurdity of appetite posing as elegance; or, here are the delights and excitements of a ...”

“... sick man yearning for health. Indeed, the sentimental poet idealises nature much as we (including, self-confessedly, Schiller) sentimentalise the Greeks themselves. The problem for modern literature of this loss of innocence is that, in contrast with the ancient simple poet, we never see ‘the object itself’: instead, the modern poet is always reflecting on ...”

“... His central doctrine is that what we give utterance to is something that lies at the pith of the self, but which is also profoundly alien to it, and which unfolds according to its own inscrutable logic. A man’s self, he remarked, is a law unto itself – not himself. In this heady blend of secularised Protestantism and ...”

“... writers are too careful not to romanticise our calling. We’re afraid of sounding soft-headed and self-indulgent. The idea is to make it seem a job like any other. Well, it isn’t. Nobody would do it if it were. Romance is what keeps us going, the old romantic Frankenstein dream of working a miracle, making life where there was none. That’s what these ...”

“... ambitious, amounting to an alternative account of what Charles Taylor calls the ‘sources of the self’. Like Taylor, Yovel is a philosophy professor, and his starting point is a philosophical account of modernity: Hegel, the philosopher of modernity par excellence, placed the gist of the modern era in the rise of the principle of subjectivity (the ...”

“... extreme difficulty, of writing a novel worth reading. This seems to be in part everyday fear of self-exposure, for which, in interviews, she tends to blame a hypercritical mother, and in part ambivalence about seeking a mass audience. On top of that, she has a nasty case of belatedness with regard to her favourite writers – they include ...”

“... 1430s and often described as the first autobiography in English – as a powerful assertion of her self in the world. The self Margery describes is different from our modern understanding of that word, however, and not only because she appears, with perhaps feigned humility, as a mere ‘creature’. As Barbara Newman shows ...”

“... the sense both of ambiguities and of secrets) they sensed in his thought. The fact that this self-proclaimed philosopher of paradoxes, an admirer of Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, was at the same time the author of some of this century’s most troubling works of pornography and a lifelong functionary (trained as a specialist in ancient coins, he had a ...”

“... to contemplate altering, or simply bypassing, the constitution, for the sake of Germany’s self-assertion as a ‘normal’ nation-state. This ‘D-Mark patriotism’ is, in Habermas’s view, an attempt to compensate for the ‘normative deficits’ of a bungled reunification process, with its disastrous social consequences, particularly in the ...”

“... the opportunity, D.H. Lawrence no less than Jane Austen. That establishing and disengaging of the self became in the 19th century more and more a part of the classic writer’s instinct, and merges with the novel’s own unique form of self-therapy. Dickens explores himself through it and Lawrence cures his sickness; Hardy ...”

“... Glasgow’s excellent West Coast magazine. In it, a group of Edinburgh junkies sit around mumbling self-servingly, doing absolutely nothing while the baby of one of them lies suffocated in its cot. The usual drunken Scottish male self-destructiveness thing suddenly looked a bit soft-focus by comparison. For what it’s ...”

“... the jacket flap blares: oh God help us, here we go again. You know there will be a lot of paranoid self-justification, in which the author revisits crimes against Jewry, against wives and against women in general committed in the novels he wrote ten, twenty, thirty years ago. There will be references, veiled or otherwise, to Roth’s personal life, to an ...”

“... sciences to license what the elderly Kant, reading young Kantians, decried as ‘an infinity of self-made conceptions’. Like young Fichte in the heady days of the 1790s, we are free again. But free to do what exactly? Here the optimists are coy and the scene somewhat confused. The confusion is in a general way caused by the fact that in the past ...”

“... awkward prose stumbling into life at this point, but if there is any life it is that of a self-intoxicating pedantry rehearsing the ghoulish pleasures of a mental closed system. It is against this kind of thing that the half-concealed anti-Gallicanism which Empson identified in Pope’s lines about critic learning flourishing most in France was mainly ...”

“... of all three are forms of autobiography while autobiography tends towards fiction. It is the self they are struggling always to define, or to create, and the self is founded on fact but not exclusively composed of it. All three gain and lose by being New Zealanders. Mansfield escaped from the colony, as it was ...”