“... wisdom about the nation and its future. It is an attempt, in effect, to repeal the scepticism and self-doubt of the Sixties and Seventies and to return to an earlier, more innocent vision of America: a vision more characteristic of the imperial years of the immediate post-war era than of the more complicated era that followed. ‘We are the pioneers of the ...”

“... her natural and unredeemed state and the peculiar idol she must become if she espouses the work of self-admonition and self-regulation, and therefore of disguise, constraint, impassivity. She must do this because, naked and unashamed, she once performed the original act or sin of flouting God’s will and of bringing man to ...”

“... Nurses are tough subjects for biography. Their ethos of compassion and, sometimes, self-sacrifice can lead to hagiography or – when times change – invite satire. It’s hard to forget Lytton Strachey’s portrait of Florence Nightingale, her health broken by her exertions in the Crimea, issuing breathless directives on sanitary reform to the secretary of war, Sidney Herbert, and harrying him into an early grave ...”

“... His inspiring words for those with similar problems. Her words inciting the vulnerable to self-murder. It was as if no one had any experience of what she was describing (or the ability to imagine it), and therefore it couldn’t be true, only shamefully exploitative. Except that I recognised well enough the condition she described, whether or not she ...”

“... 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 ...”