“... Sir?” he’d say: “Don’t waste the time of a practical man by your fantastic absurdities. Self-help, Sir, individual self-help, that’s what made our city what it is”’ – but that didn’t stop him walking ‘along the municipal pavement, lit by municipal gas and cleansed by municipal brooms with municipal ...”

“... in which it arose, the resonance of the questions it put, and the effect it had on ideas of the self in psychology and literature. Pamela Thurschwell’s fine study of Henry James, Oscar Wilde and George du Maurier1 showed how profoundly the developments in ‘magical thinking’ reverberated in fiction and its portrayal of character and perception; and ...”

“... are as lumbered with them as you are with the size of your feet. Beliefs are constitutive of the self, and so cannot be critically questioned by it. While I am believing I cannot stop believing, just as I cannot not be yawning as long as I am yawning. Convictions are more like influenza than intellectual acts. For Fish, a man has no more control over his ...”

“... complicated. Second, affluence exposes one of our principal weaknesses: our inability to exert self-control. Offer quotes Hume: ‘There is no quality in human nature, which causes more fatal errors in our conduct, than that which leads us to prefer whatever is present to the distant and remote.’ We have a powerful tendency to indulge short-term passions ...”

“... The whole point of these devices – the reason they work, insofar as they do – is they make you self-conscious about how you’re behaving, and prompt you to behave differently. They notice your being virtuous, where no one else notices (or cares), and so prompt you to be more so. Being self-conscious about how well ...”

“... I offer it a stomach that by now can only manage honeydew and cantaloupe; I offer it hunched self, hair-fall. My baby tooth. Ugly World to Empath Your spinal reflex, coddling at its base the warmest ever spot, so tiny, says: withdraw. It feeds your despair through the reed of the street-player’s clarinet. It is the mirror neuron, which looks at the ...”

“... threatens to become all too familiar, however, thinking about the human impulse to distinguish self from not-self can still help to decode our political and cultural arrangements. The ‘primordial’ category need not be simple. De Beauvoir’s own appropriation of the Other for feminist purposes had much to do with ...”

“... There is a school of psychologists who suggest that the real person is not an elusive self au-dessus de la mêlée but simply the sum of the roles that he plays: we are like actors who never come off-stage, and no interview after the performance can reveal our true selves. If this view leaves us too hollow-centred, at least it stretches us to ...”

“... is likely to throw more light on the normally ageing autobiographer than on the earlier self about whom the book is ostensibly written.’ Finney describes this critical commonplace, very plausibly, as the ‘intrinsic paradox of the genre’, and proportions his praise of autobiographers to the degree to which they show themselves aware of it. His ...”

“... person, his ankles tangling in the unwinding wool from a ball with which he has been playing. This self-contained episode, which yet reverberates throughout all the ensuing action, is so replete with Freudian symbolism – knitting wool/navel string, sexy dance/primal scene, and oh, that phallic herring! – that one expects a transformation scene as ...”

“... to Hawkes, O’Connor admitted that ‘the devil teaches most of the lessons that lead to self-knowledge.’ In the years since, critics have abandoned a Catholic interpretation of her work in favour of a psychological and secular approach. If this amounts to a betrayal of O’Connor’s ‘anagogical vision’, perhaps that’s no bad thing: her ...”

“... by others. We can have it only at the price of a disavowal: although I know very well that my self-esteem depends on serotonin, I nonetheless enjoy it. Fukuyama writes: The normal, and morally acceptable, way of overcoming low self-esteem was to struggle with oneself and with others, to work hard, to endure sometimes ...”

“... makes clear, what enabled this strange chemistry to get going was a mixture of uneasiness and self-assurance about class that the poets recognised and warmed to in each another. Shelley, according to Byron, was ‘as perfect a Gentleman as ever crossed a drawing room’, but his background was only precariously genteel. Grandfather Bysshe twice eloped ...”

“... England’s shores. American writers simply did not have the time or energy to spare for all that self-scrutiny and existential doubt, that Eliotian difficulty. There was a job to be done, in that the young nation was still engaged in forging itself – as, indeed, it still is – and novelists saw themselves as the chief chroniclers of that process, in full ...”

“... how people use Instagram: among the most popular are #love, #me, #tbt (truth be told), #cute, #self, #beautiful, #girl, #summer, #happy, #fun, #smile and so on. Instagram users, nine out of ten of whom are under 35, the majority of them female, tend to use the service a lot, even at work, so its push-button simplicity is an important feature. Perhaps its ...”