“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”