“... the octogenarian Nichols hovering over the cradle with the power to spare or choke his infant self. The third would presumably have given us his decision, but he never finished it. Rising to his feet to look at something in his last garden, he collapsed, rallied temporarily in hospital, but died six days later. It’s a very bad poem: ...”

“... treason in its pure form, dogma distilled into a pathogen’. The doctor’s conduct was finally self-destructive: ‘If he had been asked to give his opinion of Hitler or Himmler, he would not have been able to summon up any terms of disapprobation that he had not already lavished on Houghaway or Hollohough’ (Leavis, according to James’s not altogether ...”

“... producer’ and ‘indulgent consumer’ values, and the complex relationship between ‘ideals of self-reliance and self-assertion and the pressures and attractions of modern organisation’. His fourth and final chapter compares ‘American toughness’ with ‘toughness elsewhere’, the ‘elsewhere’ being principally ...”

“... himself has never had any difficulty in justifying his actions: but he often seems much richer in self-confidence than in self-knowledge. He has aspired to live a ‘poetic’ life, but not in any merely ironic or self-dramatising sense, not like Gérard de Nerval and his pet lobster. If ...”

“... Sonnets 29 and 121 (‘No, I am that I am ...’) make essentially the same point: that the real self is not involved in these occupations, whether of poet or playwright, courtier or lover. And the implications of this are extraordinary, for we have come to take for granted, as part of the romantic legacy, that an artist is never more truly himself than in ...”

“... and Seifu’s account of Chausiki’s cure was one of the first scientific reports of animal self-medication. Cindy Engel tells the story well in Wild Health, a wonderful collection of tales about the ways in which animals prevent and cure ill-health. A general in Han Dynasty China noticed that sick horses gained vigour from eating Plantago asiatica, and ...”

“... to her; and he moves into a floor of the house occupied by her mother, an elegant and self-assured woman, whose ‘vitality’ has always cast its shadow on Irena’s own self-confidence. Before she can stop herself, Irena reflects: ‘The police barrier between the Communist countries and the West is pretty ...”

“... perhaps, as the book too often seems to assume, a sympathetic attitude to his capacity for huge self-indulgence. Rage and grief are important emotions in AHWOSG, as he likes to call it. But solipsism, knowingness, whimsy and a love of cute fonts are essential ingredients of the Eggers manner, too, and he can be off-puttingly keen to get this across: ‘The ...”

“... novel, The Story of Elizabeth. Thackeray’s endorsement was the ground of an indestructible self-belief. Anny never quite outgrew a submissive dedication to his memory, but his death meant liberation. Her breezy assumption that there would always be enough money, with a little left over, caused her friends and family much bother. She was also a ...”

“... Manlius while sipping a martini – were proof that Salinger’s writing was essentially ‘self-help copy … for the upper middle classes’. Why is it that unhappy narrators are often know-it-alls? Perhaps Frankie can’t help it. Her intellectual fervour is gauche, but collating facts in her mind – repeating by rote what she does know, when ...”

“... the sex of his sexual partners per se but the extent to which he displayed a masculine style of self-assertiveness, both on the street and in the sheets (or public parks); judged according to those high standards of masculine comportment, the local ministers – with their deferential middle-class manners, their ethic of humility and submissiveness and ...”

“... exists, and a dedication not to literary theory but to literary principles is neither a self-deception nor a subterfuge but a grounded choice. Theory is characterised by its degree of elaboration, concatenation, completeness, abstraction, self-consciousness, and technicality risked. None of these is unique to ...”

“... with sudden ecstasy that this was true being, where words and consciousness and the solitary self melted into one. ‘She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,’ wrote Wordsworth of his sister Dorothy. Virginia Woolf gave more than that: she gave, or seemed to give, the pure Private Life, quite separate from the contingent miseries, anxieties and rivalries of ...”

“... back of Atlas Shrugged, are: 1. Metaphysics: Objective Reality 2. Epistemology: Reason 3. Ethics: Self-interest 4. Politics: Capitalism Apparently, Rand originally gave these answers while standing on one leg, having been challenged to do so. The relationship with reality, the universe, whatever, is cribbed from Aristotle, and isn’t very interesting. The ...”

“... or a leaf and quizzes them the start of dialogue and so commencement of the soul’s unfolding self-invention in a world that shifts and turns but really has no end and surely what we mean by soul is something no anatomist could find: a total sum of movement and exchange how winter starts along an empty street the first snow flaring dark into the light a ...”