“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Mesures. The article was presented as an essay by Hegel called ‘Autonomy and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Servitude’ (in fact a section of the Phenomenology) with an inconspicuous note at the end: ‘traduit et commenté par A. Kojève’. But Kojève’s self-effacement was deceptive. His ...”

“... 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 ...”