“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on their teachings. The Buddha was moved by human suffering to seek enlightenment; Socrates was self-abnegating and wise in his knowledge of his own lack of wisdom; Confucius left politics to teach the importance of duty, self-cultivation and personal example. They all seem to have abided by their own teachings, which has ...”

“... a pragmatic Cold War liberal rather than a revolutionary socialist. Berlin’s portrait (or self-portrait) has stood largely unaltered for more than half a century. Herzen’s work has not had consistent backing inside or outside academia, on the left or on the right, and Aileen Kelly’s new biography is unlikely to provoke a revival, or the sort of ...”

“... studies and critical legal sociology. These movements scrutinise what may be called the cultural self-constitution of law. They attempt to trace exactly how the law goes about establishing its own splendid eminence. In so doing, they adopt an external perspective on the law, keenly aware of the outward mechanics of its operation, but seemingly indifferent to ...”

“... upper emotional register. Despite every opportunity of scene and action, it never does. He is too self-aware, or perhaps too fastidious, to abandon himself to a coloratura line. Instead, he chills Asya’s character to the point where he as narrator can safely handle it: ‘When in later life people said she was cold, she never disagreed. For she knew, and ...”

“... throughout historical variation is the construction of body, as something apart from the true self (whether conceived as soul, mind, spirit, will, creativity, freedom ...) and as undermining the best efforts of that self. That which is not body is the highest, the best, the noblest, the closest to God.’ In ...”

“... the byways of Modernism, autobiography is beginning to be widely used as a deliberately uncertain, self-exploratory form. Record and narrative are not renounced, but their threads are loose, within a different intended effect. The difference from fiction of the same apparent kind is, however, still crucial. Always, within the autobiographical form, a figure ...”

“... of their personalities, the clash between a man who insists there is no such thing as the self and a woman whose psychological disorder requires her to interpret everything in the world as relating to her. Of course, it’s Vander who proves the real egotist. ‘Were we,’ Vander asks, any of us, anything more than the sum of our attributes, even to ...”

“... pursuit of a woman. ‘Serves me right’ is his last conscious thought. As a protracted study in self-analysis, self-reproach and self-vindication, the Tommy novels are remarkable productions. ‘Have you discovered,’ Barrie asks his readers, ‘that I was really pitying the boy who ...”

“... reached its inevitable flowering in national independence. Early in this century, Bancroft’s self-congratulatory narrative came under attack from two sources. The ‘Progressive’ historians saw the struggle for independence as a social movement that not only pitted colonists against the mother country, but downtrodden artisans and small farmers against ...”

“... biology is pervaded by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the significance of that theory for our self-understanding remains largely unassimilated. It isn’t just that evolution contradicts the Biblical story of the creation – which the Roman Catholic Church and most Protestant denominations don’t take literally any more. Darwin’s theory, as usually ...”

“... heart of the book which was to become an important feature of modern thought. At the core of the self is something – the Will – which is implacably other to that self, an inert, intolerable weight of meaninglessness, as though we were all permanently pregnant with monsters. What makes me what I am is utterly ...”

“... 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 ...”