“... of scientific objectivity’. For too long, Felski suggests, critics have clung to ideals of ‘self-effacement and willed impersonality’. This approach – which ‘screens out any flicker of emotion, tamps down idiosyncratic impulses and steers clear of the first-person voice’ – contributes, in her view, to the clipped and colourless nature of much ...”

“... of Jung’s responses was ‘ruefulness-faithfulness’, which Kerr rather boldly claims has a ‘self-evident’ meaning: vis-à-vis Spielrein, Jung was regretting his fidelity to his wife. When Jung and Freud first met, on 3 March 1907, there appears to have been no mention of the Russian girl. Each was impressed by the other, with minor reservations. On ...”

“... knew what boys got up to but dared not define it. ‘Ah, boys, boys, what a glorious thing is self-mastery!’ is as near as he got. His ideal young male was ‘a man strong enough to roll over a bullock on the emu plains of Australia with one blow of the fist’. Such prowess was not to be gained by thinking in bed, a temporary cure for which was ten ...”

“... foot and ankle are leaving the picture. ‘To the right of the canvas I read the small typed card: Self-Portrait by William Wechsler.’ Everybody who will matter in the story, apart from the children, is involved with the picture: Bill Wechsler paints it; Violet, Bill’s lover and model, is shown centre-stage in it; Lucille, his poet wife, exits the frame ...”

“... from Darcy and realises that she has been ‘blind, partial, prejudiced, absurd’, this moment of self-knowledge also represents, Cavell says, her knowledge of being known, of being acknowledged, ‘as if until then her existence had been denied, had suffered the polite scepticism – the little deaths – of everyday life.’ Cynics, Cavell goes on to ...”

“... she haunts their empty house. The adult Moore says she doesn’t want to excuse her younger self: ‘I was hungry for love. I know that. But so are many sad hungry children and they don’t rummage people’s living quarters and eat their food.’ Her childhood was unhappy, but she suspects that even if it hadn’t been she still would have eaten too ...”

“... everything and everyone and in the end seems madder than her mother. She slides into excruciating self-exposure, to the point of confessing her sexual frustration to the resolutely silent official. Salvayre repeatedly throws the women’s logorrhea against the man’s taciturnity, playing the bathos for all it’s worth: the mother fulminates, the daughter ...”

“... on their results: ‘In a country which ... after the end of the Second World War bases its moral self-understanding upon the myth of the Resistance, completely different myths suddenly spring up and transform what is “real”. This result alone is worth the cost of the research.’ How so? It is not news that for a long time the French exaggerated their ...”

“... Goldsmith, Sir Joseph Banks, Burney, Garrick, Sheridan, Gibbon and Adam Smith. In their role as self-appointed custodians of culture, literary clubs combined some of the functions of the Paris salon and the university the capital lacked. There was no true continental equivalent to the British obsession with the institution Johnson’s Dictionary defined as ...”

“... the mythical women that Ruskin identifies with Rose La Touche). Loyalty can also be a form of self – assertion. In Ruskin’s case it implies an indifference to changing tastes and values that made him repellent to the literary generation that followed him, and often makes him seem an alien presence now. The central reason is the unremittingly religious ...”

“... Phineas G. imposes: ‘I suspect that much of what we stigmatise as irresolution is due to our Self being by no means one and indivisible, and that we do not care to sacrifice the Self of the moment for a different one.’ Psychological incoherence is interesting enough, but why display it on an index card rather than ...”

“... affect; he likes being made to feel ‘glidey’ and ‘nice’; he’s funny about the artists’ self-mythologising and bad behaviour, and irony for him is natural. The presiding angel would appear to be Gertrude Stein, in Alice B. Toklas mode, fauxnaive and paratactic, artless and kooky, the godmother of Adrian Mole. But his favourite art critic, as he ...”

“... of some important painters, notably Degas and Monet, but his comments on art were either self-inflating pronouncements or insults (a Sargent portrait, he said, showed the ‘cleverness of an officer who cuts up oranges into fancy shapes after dinner’). He was ‘patchily informed about the Old Masters’, according to Sarah Walden, ‘and seems to ...”

“... nothing but their own myths of themselves, shambling golems moulded together out of fear, out of self-loathing and arrogance and delusion and lust. And animated by a stamp. His life is approaching a crisis. Various menaces are converging. Jared Sprain, a depressed customer, commits suicide before Mailman can deliver a comforting letter from a ...”

“... a life’s work of her ostracisation from the American mainstream and her own subsequent self-reinvention’. Wilson’s book provides a lot of material for what Freud called ‘wild analysis’. We learn, for example, that five months before Highsmith was born, her mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine; she later told her daughter about ...”