“... and daughter, and describes him as ‘tyrannical and paranoiac’, not to mention ‘hysterical, self-pitying, often irrational, melodramatic, verbose and manipulative’. Melograni, too, notes that Leopold was a past master at instilling guilt in his formerly model son (whose motto as a child, as he later reminded his father, was ‘Next to God comes ...”

“... There seems to be something paradoxical, even self-contradictory, in the very notion of a Reformation image. The movement of religious protest inaugurated by Martin Luther in Wittenberg in 1517 quickly targeted the veneration of images as a damnable superstition, the idolatrous confusion of gross matter with an invisible God who was pure and eternal spirit ...”

“... on former Communists and the second by the intellectual’s marriage to a demanding and ultimately self-destructive sex goddess. Despite Miller’s disingenuous claim that he had no idea people might associate this character with Monroe, the play was dismissed by a vitriolic press as tasteless, embarrassing and exhibitionist, and thrived only as a succès de ...”

“... Humphrey Jennings never lacked a sense of self-worth. Peggy Guggenheim, with whom he had a brief affair in 1937, remembered him jumping up and down on their Parisian hotel bed crying out: ‘Look at me! … Don’t you think I’m beautiful?’ In fact, she thought he looked like Donald Duck, and insisted he put his clothes on and take her to meet André Breton ...”

“... the very virtues one might think of in such a context – honour, loyalty, the capacity for self-sacrifice – are employed in the service of an exploitative empire, and therefore versions of subaltern illusion. This debate resounds throughout the novel. A wounded Indian officer fighting for the British against the Japanese in World War Two suddenly has ...”

“... is ‘neither fish, fowl nor good red herring’. In the end, Bandini decides that in her lack of self-consciousness Camilla is more authentic, ‘deeper rooted’ than himself. But this makes her unsuited to life in Los Angeles, a city of dust and fog which he thinks of as a ‘sad flower in the sand’, grown up and maintained artificially in the desert. At ...”

“... which survives Romantic misery (the Werther-like ‘Sorrows of Teufelsdröckh’), the collapse of self-sufficiency and romantic love and dogmatic certainties. The bewildering experience of almost drowning in Teufelsdröckh’s self-consciousness, reading one’s way past confusion, uncertainty and Byronic despair to ...”

“... persons of Caesar and narrator coincided. At any rate, the experience instilled in my childhood self a (not articulated) sense, residual still, that there might be a mystical, if misty, relationship between reading and power. Francis Spufford, a third of the way into The Child that Books Built, tells the following story: I learnt to read around my sixth ...”

“... he writes of community in another letter to Goodyer, Donne presents it as only part of a regime of self-tuning, in which withdrawal into melancholic loneliness and participation in society must alternate, as though either alone would swamp him: Sometimes when I finde my self transported with jollity, and love of company, I ...”

“... Michel Foucault’s Folie et déraison, Erving Goffman’s Asylums and R.D. Laing’s Divided Self, which, along with Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness, also published in 1961, were set to become iconoclastic classics. There is a revealing passage in History of Madness in which Foucault proposes that ‘the knowledge of madness supposes in the ...”

“... the American soil of the book’s themes or subject matter: multicultural brotherhood, immigrant self-fashioning in the New World, post-9/11 New York. This compact novel, in which an emotionally buttoned-down new arrival recounts the downfall of another recent transplant who is, by contrast with him, an extravagant dreamer, has won admiring comparisons to ...”

“... in English, Munthe’s fourth language (after Swedish, French and Italian), makes its casual self-assurance all the more impressive. Stories often give way to – or give rise to – opinionated disquisitions on one or another of Munthe’s pet subjects. He was fascinated by death and dying, and was such a fervent believer in euthanasia – when a doctor ...”

“... or was he, as Arthur Danto puts it, ‘overproductive, repetitive and shallow’? Naive, or a self-consciously calculating opportunist? The canny ‘manager of his own fairyland’ (Jean Cassou), or a painter who carefully cultivated his image as a ‘loveable, fantastical Jewish genius from Vitebsk’ (Clement Greenberg)? Crypto Christian or too ...”

“... stands for something else, especially when the relationship between symbol and referent is merely self-evident, or portentous in the murkiest of ways. The symbol has often defined that which is of great importance but a bit ineffable, or that which is so readily apparent as to seem trite. It was important in the development of psychoanalysis. Jung was ...”

“... the moment you’re being told about it.’ Glass then delivers his version of the origins of the self, a curious mixture of Rousseau, evolutionary biology and rugged individualism: Back then, we all used to hang out together all day long doing the same thing. We lived in packs. So there was no need for language. If there was a leopard coming, there was no ...”