“... reflection. But though he thinks it fails as a programme, ‘the description of the ethical self’ it offers, a self grounded in a particular society and way of life, a self constituted and given value by dispositions and habits of character, is one to which he is broadly ...”

“... October 1920’. However, as Schwarcz observes, political rehabilitation ‘is not the same as self-rehabilitation’. Zhang was anxious both to justify himself to himself, and also to be remembered as a philosopher. He was, in her words, ‘arrogant’ and convinced that he was ‘the greatest philosopher in 20th-century China.’ His ambitions on this ...”

“... other extreme Catholicism, in a fraught political and emotional climate where everything from the self to the nation was open to invention. Declan Kiberd tries in this vast, wide-ranging book to find various contexts in which the literature of the Irish Renaissance can be placed. To write a deliberately new style, whether Hiberno-English or Whitmanian ...”

“... at the age of 31. Faulks also suggests that they lived and died in the shadow of war. This is self-evidently so with Hillary, while it can be plausibly argued that the slaughter of the Great War was a determining element in Wood’s background and that the Cold War contributed to Wolfenden’s early death. The trio differed in their sexuality – Wood was ...”

“... though the occasions have passed. Shaw, like Keller, is aggressive, provocative, an unashamed self-presenter (in Shaw’s case self-promoter too, though of course not as musician); both are outrageously biased and flamboyantly exhibitionistic. The differences are that Shaw is wide-ranging, intellectually ...”

“... unshy predictions as to the revolutionising of American letters. Kerouac was never one to be self-effacing, but neither was he slow to praise the fluttering genius of his pals. ‘By virtue of my youth and enthusiasm and fire,’ Jack writes to Sebastian, of their friend Ian/Yann, he has been reborn: perhaps! But by virtue of his weary knowledge, his ...”

“... to him, how did he waste our time with his stories? He’s very insistent on being noticed, how self-centred of him, what an egotist he is. Pay him no further mind.Even so, his progress out of the book is sketched so as to produce a neat join with the next scene (perversely neat, given the book’s often rough transitions), in which Anton rehearses his ...”

“... lousy desert that made up her picture of village life. She lived like a prisoner, an urban refugee self-immured behind the vicarage’s bars and shutters. None of my new school friends were allowed in the house, of course. You could get into the vicarage garden via a side yard, or by climbing over the walls, and that was the way we did it. The whole thing was ...”

“... who suffers from it, and people in life are much more mysterious than people in literature. Any self-respecting student can tell you what King Lear’s madness was all about, or Lady Macbeth’s, or even Hamlet’s ‘antic disposition’ (true madness or feigned?). But I have ransacked the resources of Freud and Jung, cognitive and transactional ...”

“... Berlant calls ‘cruel optimism’. People open themselves to exploitation when the sense of self-worth that derives from doing something they believe in comes up against a hierarchical authority that is secretive, arbitrary and ruthless. Cruel optimism afflicts the colleague who agrees to yet another change of policy in the hope that it will be the last ...”

“... provides a clue to the puzzle about what sort of thing these books are: quest narratives, with the self as the quest-object. A moment later, as she imagines the adults calling down the rabbit hole, the same question takes on a different tone: ‘Who am I then? Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down ...”

“... in FDR’s inaugural address, ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,’ written by the self-help guru Napoleon Hill, author of the 1937 runaway bestseller, Think and Grow Rich. The president knew how to carry out Hill’s positive-thinking agenda. His first official act was a masterstroke of spin: he closed the banks to prevent them failing and ...”

“... a moral turn, not least inside the Dutch Reformed Church, which fatally undermined the regime’s self-confidence? And was not that turn inspired by the example of Mandela in the ultimate non-violent situation, banged up on Robben Island? What about those equally startling velvet revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, or more recently in Burma? Most ...”

“... preferences, and The Whole Harmonium is one such. Stevens is one of those apparently fortunate, self-standing poets who are not greatly involved with the styles or personalities of their time, whose work sets no puzzles and makes a sufficiently vivid impression all by itself. It’s hard to disagree with Elsie, who after her husband’s death sold his books ...”

“... at the time, and have been preserved whole, what you find is a pervasive sentimentality, a strong self-referential tendency, a structure of iron logic. The Incorruptible was also the unpredictable. He was a fissiparous bundle of contradictions. He idealised ‘the people’ and profoundly distrusted anyone who claimed to speak for them. He distrusted the very ...”