“... 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 ...”

“... exclude flexibility and intimacy and can in any case be deceptive. Crystals of agency and self-interest can precipitate out of an apparently neutral solution. Both Atonement and Sweet Tooth could be categorised as masked first-person narratives, since the impersonal authority of the story being told unravels towards the end of each book, with the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... is born out of exchanges and thrives on differences. In this sense, ‘national culture’ is a self-contradiction, and ‘multiculturalism’ a pleonasm. The death of culture lies in self-centredness, self-sufficiency and isolation. (Here, for instance, the first concern – it seems ...”

“... without it being ‘fine writing’ as so much pastoral writing is. What it is, though it’s self-serving to say so, is a commentary on the last speech from Forty Years On: ‘Were we closer to the ground as children or is the grass emptier now?’20 June. When from 1944-45 we lived in Guildford, we often ate (had to eat, the truth of it) in the British ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”