“... or atheism that makes tragic drama impossible, but chaos theory.) So Oedipus’ ultimate self-recognition is numinous and reassuring. Whereas, at the end of Lear, Nuttall suggests, Shakespeare ‘offers no such clinching final insight’, and this is part of the play’s power and, more enigmatically, of the pleasure we get from ...”

“... not suggest a single novel, let alone far-reaching, consequence of his insight. It will become self-evident he says, that reality is not co-extensive with what we can understand. Well, despite the fact that Magee hates Hume (the worst thing he can say about a philosopher is that he is a ‘regression towards Hume’), Hume thought exactly that. ‘While ...”

“... some lasting from noon to dawn, repeatedly insisting that detailed prescriptions would be self-defeating; that the right method was to set out the goals the courts were to achieve. By the spring of 1804 the whole project was law. The fresh codification now under way under the great conseiller Braibant is the task of a decade where Bonaparte’s ...”

“... By separating them, we raise what for Bergson is the pseudo-problem of an ‘underlying’ self whose successive ‘states’ these supposedly are; but there is no need in Bergsonism (any more than in Buddhism) for any such spooky supernumerary, since each contourless ‘I’ simply goes with the flow, borne along on the crest of its history. For all ...”

“... great account of the time, Generation on Trial. He was the man who made Richard Nixon’s self-serving book, Six Crises (a ‘campaign book’ for an entire career), possible in the first place. Witness, his own work, had a marked influence on Arthur Koestler and on Czeslaw Milosz and is, indeed, the nativist American equivalent of Darkness at Noon or ...”

“... water has always held the magical power to cure. Somehow or other it transmits its own self-regenerating power to the swimmer. I can dive in with a long face and what feels like a terminal case of depression and come out a whistling idiot.’ With his trusty snorkel, he stakes out the whole of watery England for his Grail quest. Like ...”

“... what spirit, Edward Wortley recognised himself in the ironic portrait of Waitfort. The widow’s self-portrait, it should be said, is hardly more flattering. While the piece does speak up for women, it is more interested in talking back to Addison. Even before Pope’s attacks on her in the Dunciad and elsewhere made ‘confutation ... a leading imperative ...”

“... to another. The book struck me as tedious, certainly not dirty in any obvious way, and massively self-important. In those unpolitical days of mine, I had no idea what I had really bought: a fruit of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and one of its many subsidiaries. A few years later, when I got my first job at Columbia University in 1963, I met many of ...”

“... tentative, experimental trying on and putting off of identities, the improvisational efforts at self-definition characteristic of a time when both Irishmen and gay men were striving to forge in the smithy of their souls the uncreated conscience of their respective races – and were doing it, like Stephen Daedalus, through writing. Gay community has ...”

“... It was a compulsion to achieve something durable, beyond the ordinary limits of the self, he says in the Carnets, because writing is a search for ‘polypersonality’. Some people find the Memoirs and Carnets frustrating for their lack of personal material: almost no mention of the three wives, one of whom was driven mad by the tensions of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... up traditional Protestant attitudes as well as the power structure of Port Ticonderoga. The more self-consciously truthful a recording is, the more apt it is to be a lie. (Unless the reader learns to read slantwise as we do with the quotes from the Toronto Star, the Port Ticonderoga Herald and Banner, the Mail and Empire.) Truth is seldom or never ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... treated in the novels is one of the keys to their interest. John Rebus, born in irritation at the self-ghettoising of the literary novel, grew into a highly effective tool for describing and engaging with modern Scotland. Rankin does not indulge any temptation to play formal games with his character. There is no ludic or ironic component to the series, just ...”

“... sanctimoniousness tempered by cowardice – of Western policy, his astringent dissection of self-serving internationalist hypocrisy is more valuable than ever. Jonathan Haslam’s perceptive and intelligent biography shows how much Carr’s thinking was shaped by the age into which he was born, even if he seemed on the surface to have broken utterly ...”