“... to the black behind the shadows,             the hand-shadow being cast by his one self on the dark,             by the single lightbulb behind him the hum, his own knuckles here and the tightly clenched fingers wrapped like a bird-beak around the chalk             gripping something to bring home to the nest ...”

“... not. A voice worn all along its seams, I ought to stop listening. I ought to stop. The mind’s self-deceptions inspire awe. Its mountains. Must I walk there alone, without a guide? I do not know the things I know, they are folded into my routines imperceptibly. I do not see what there is to be seen, the way they tear the skin off an animal and fit it to ...”

“... and ‘consciousness’ are tricky concepts. He appears to have at once a total disregard for the self and a sense of it as an unshakeable core. I could go on. Or I could direct to you to a hilarious, if slightly unkind website, www.kevinwarwick.org.uk, the home of ‘Kevin Warwick Watch’. Among the things it keeps count of are mentions of Mrs Warwick. The ...”

“... old Baths. Uncanny pleasure moved within her like a full-rigged ship As if she entered her naked self Into a silky sea of ships; Great full-masters sailed across her breasts. Her smile in the office meant the tide was full, The draught sufficient, As the great barque in its weathered colours Glides past the window, pennant flying, In its weathered ...”

“... that students from disadvantaged backgrounds have to be more determined, more committed and more self-reliant to do well at A-level than more privileged students.’ This worthiness should be tempered by the fact that still only 60 per cent of students at Bristol are from state schools, and only 11 per cent are from working-class backgrounds, compared to a ...”

“... plunges into chaos: pro-Bush rebels seize power in West; DC in Flames’; ‘Clinton declares self President for life’; ‘Bush executes 253 New Mexico Democrats.’ And once he was in the White House: ‘Bush – “Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over.”’ The opening story in the compendium is ‘Half-naked Kissinger ...”

“... or a single tall one. Please return dishes to main room after using. Try a little subtlety in self-defence; it’ll help, you’ll find out. The boards of the cottage grew apart and we walked out into the sand under the sea. It was time for the sun to exhort the mute apathy of sitters, hangers-on. Ballast of the universal dredging operation. The device ...”

“... No more soft explosions of hair in water – Diderot’s electric, scintillating extension of self, His thread of atoms glittering with static! – All senseless and endless as we are shown it, top heavy, twisted in fetters, Dragged along in the current squeezed sentimentally from the rock. Dawn must not be our metaphor, you understand. (The young man ...”

“... But what if they had? The LRB recently received an e-mail from a company called Yellow Dragon Self Defence, informing us that ‘in your line of work … there is a high risk of being assaulted, abducted, even killed. I have read in the papers of many such incidences.’ Perhaps they were thinking of the non-story of last year in which someone who ...”

“... of childhood reminiscence, jazz and junk lore, obscene sexual anecdotes and fearless, often japing self-revelation – Laurie, with Pepper’s permission, asked some of his old bandmates, producers, drug dealers, prison cronies and girlfriends to add their own insightful (and often unflattering) comments. The resulting feuilleton was hailed as a poetic ...”

“... considerable poetic powers, this writer seems to me possessed with a more intense and morbid self-consciousness than I ever knew in any sane human being.’ Paracelsus (1835) was better received, especially in liberal periodicals, and more widely read: people began to talk of Browning as a Coming Poet. This moderate success must have puffed up his ...”

“... of the King of Brobdingnag, as a pernicious race of little odious vermin. Even Richard Rorty, the self-styled postmodernist liberal, felt able to pronounce that cruelty was ‘the worst thing we do’. Torture has posed a problem for philosophers. Simple utilitarianism has notorious difficulties in explaining why torture or other such abuse is bad in ...”

“... Watt had stayed in his nomadic search for health. Humphry was a promising teenage poet and a self-taught experimental chemist who claimed to have overthrown Lavoisier’s caloric theory of heat and to have achieved other significant advances in knowledge using apparatus assembled from a broken clock and an enema tube rescued from a local shipwreck. As ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”