“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... on a grant, the easy-if-you’re-young-and-single 1980s dole. So he’s well read and fittingly self-conscious, aware that the unease he feels is not his alone, but one of the classic modernist positions. He’d like to be ‘no more than a single human man’, in the words of his hero, DHL, but somehow finds himself more like Kierkegaard’s unhappiest ...”

“... within weeks his flimsy cover had been blown, and ‘The Opium-Eater’ became a transparent and self-advertising pseudonym that he cultivated for the rest of his improbably long life. By 1840 the Opium-Eater had taken on a cosmopolitan life of his own. Gogol adapted his London dream-wanderings to St Petersburg in Nevsky Prospekt; in America the Confessions ...”

“... Karl Kraus. The Kraus Project is Franzen’s reckoning with his undergraduate self; with his ambitions and frustrations; with his completist tendencies to let no juvenilia go to waste and no headline go unremarked; and with the publishing legacy of the generation of the 1960s and 1970s. That was the era when Pynchon, Barth and Coover were ...”