“... 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 ...”

“... understand the meaning of this rock; besides, what is this feeling of calm based on – on health, self-assurance, individual personality? I: on the emphasis on God. He (immediately changing his tone): well, that’s a different matter. Prokofiev now not only embraced ‘the new simplicity’ but also showed complete readiness to use Soviet subject matter and ...”

“... by all accounts a charismatic figure, but in the 1970s, at the height of his messianic Maoism, his self-belief had begun to evaporate. His life hadn’t quite worked out the way he might once have hoped, and in what turned out to be his final years he backed away from almost every position he had formerly held, even rewriting his early and most difficult ...”

“... advancement’. Sometimes even at the expense of his fellow officers: his famous – and much self-publicised – ‘great escape’ from the Boers in Pretoria in December 1899 left two comrades behind, fuming. He was quite brazen about this, which earned him little love among his fellow soldiers, or among his (very) senior officers, especially when – a ...”

“... that the rules didn’t apply,’ but he doesn’t go here. In Ulysses, Molly Bloom’s euphoric self-affirmation is too lyrical, Gerty MacDowell’s allusions to menstruation too seemly and quaint. McBride has said that her aim is ‘to make language cope with and more fully describe that part of life that is destroyed once it begins to get put into ...”

“... uplifting conclusion. She had it all worked out: Lovelace, ‘overwhelmed with grief, remorse, and self condemnation’, would fall into a ‘dangerous fever’ and be attended by Clarissa on his deathbed; charitably, she would agree to his dying wish to have their hands joined in marriage; invigorated by the promise of her affections, he would make a full ...”

“... the conventional narrative that is altogether more fascinating, not least in the way it omits any self-congratulation about human achievement. His account of the deep past doesn’t purport to be definitive, but it is surely more accurate than the one we’re used to, and it implicitly exposes the flaws in contemporary political ideas that ultimately rest on ...”