“... perversity, revolution to transgression, the transformation of society to the reinvention of the self. Revolutions are made in the name of wealth, freedom, fullness of life; but those who make them are the worst possible image of the world they hope to fashion. Because asceticism, self-sacrifice, ruthless utility are among ...”

“... is that a part of ourselves doesn’t use this vocabulary; it is not that a part of ourselves is self-destructive, it is that a part of ourselves has no regard for whether our actions are destructive or constructive. Indeed, the notion of self-destructive behaviour itself presumes not merely that we know what constructive ...”

“... other things surrogates for religion. Like the Almighty, the nation is one, sacred, autonomous, self-grounding, without end or origin, a source of eternal life, deserving of veneration and well worth dying for. Irish nationalism tended by and large to strike uneasy alliances with an enormously powerful church rather than seek to counter its influence; but ...”

“... but with a thesis’; ‘this biography does useful service, but not much more.’ His self-assessments could be equally brusque: ‘I exaggerate a little, but not outrageously’ – this in an essay entitled ‘Is Michael Neve paranoid?’, a question that answers itself, though the piece answers a different question, about the history of the ...”

“... of Israel then the bombing of Gaza, in the eyes of the Israeli state, becomes a legitimate form of self-defence. In fact, Israel’s ‘right to self-defence’ has become a mantra for those wishing to justify the devastation of Gaza, which, by means of incarceration and siege, has long been proceeding apace (whether an ...”

“... to the point where they yield up a series of perverse rhetorical manoeuvres at odds with any self-respecting ‘philosophic’ argument. It is tropes, not concepts, that structure the economy of Kantian reason and enable its crucial transitions from stage to stage of ‘enlightened’ critique. From the deconstructive viewpoint, de Man’s is a reading ...”

“... The ravaged harridan, Henny, the focus of the novel, dies in a grand, fated gesture, an act of self-immolation that, so outrageous has been her previous suffering, is almost a conventional catharsis. One feels that all Henny’s previous life has been a preparation for her sudden, violent departure from it and, although the novel appals, it ...”

“... The Reader as he considers the behaviour of his own group, ‘and at the same time parade one’s self-righteousness?’ Schlink is something of an adept at taking on the burden of guilt. Before writing The Reader, he wrote detective novels – two were translated into English following his international acclaim – in which the main character and narrator is ...”

“... problem: it only arose from a misunderstanding of what he meant by sympathy, on the one hand, and self-love, on the other. But still, the problematists weren’t wrong that some central elements of Smith’s mind pointed in strikingly different directions, so that, say, sentimentalist and utilitarian admirers could equally find encouragement for their ...”

“... a plan to make the world ‘safe for democracy’. Inspired by Wilson’s advocacy of national self-determination, Ho sought an audience with the US president, hoping to persuade him to use his new influence to restore Vietnamese rule in French Indo-China. He carefully quoted from the US Declaration of Independence in his petition. In Manela’s more ...”

“... participation in the war is indicted, but only incidentally, in part because Wolff’s search for self is always centre-stage, in part because he identifies with Carver’s milieu, writes from the perspective of a grunt, to whose limited expectations he is loyal (unlike, say, Brecht, who also depicted war from a grunt’s perspective, but found its ...”

“... and American versions of psychoanalysis with fantasies of boundaries and separateness and the self as a unique possession reflects this fear of jumble, and the terrors of exchange that can make the idea of the self into a prison. People’s lives as miscellaneous and contingent but still, or for that reason, narratable ...”

“... greenham’ (of women keeping vigil outside a hospital). Here are the double-take paradoxes of low self-esteem congratulating itself: ‘If I hadn’t been drinking I’d have thought I’d been drinking.’ The Amis style, though, doesn’t altogether fit its new context. John Self would gorge himself on emetic burgers but ...”

“... with these books need not be apprehensive, however: The Truth about Lorin Jones is perfectly self-contained. Indeed, that self-contained quality helps to account for the powerful, painful oppressiveness of the book, as Polly Alter becomes more and more deeply enmeshed in her quest for the eponymous woman she is ...”

“... the preface to his Collected Poems 1954 he expressed surprise at hearing in his poems ‘a buried self speaking, now and then, with such urgency’. And he liked that image so well that he later titled his autobiography, in a regrettable pun, The Buried Day. This implied division of the poet’s life into a surface self and ...”