“... he gave it the title ‘Jules Was’, which he now finds ‘provisionally awful and archly self-pitying’.We are beginning to see what Barnes wants (and doesn’t want) for this book. He has a wonderful throwaway characterisation of his diary: ‘It is, like all diaries, fully partial.’ And there is a modest precision about the following ...”

“... where ageing and death are treated as intolerable embarrassments. Barrodale rejects self-improvement, opting instead for an undisciplined, unlikeable narrator who also happens to be dead. You can try to live for ever – marshalling your willpower and multivitamins – but, like Sandra, the documentary filmmaker at the centre of Trip, you might ...”

“... and general air of collapse, it is hard not to see in these ‘portraits’ a devasting image of self, something dragged out from within, like entrails. Bourgeois often wore her insides on the outside. ‘For me, sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture,’ she said, a point she reiterated in 1975 when she posed with the latex mould of Avenza on the ...”

“... only philosophically unjustified but politically retrograde. These concepts are said to express a self-glorifying myth of the sovereign Western ego, a myth that enables professional élites to repress disruptive textual – which is to say, psychological and social – forces. Accordingly, these critics conceive of texts, not as communications by individual ...”

“... power-diffusing where the ‘Attlee consensus’ concentrated power. Above all, it will have to be self-consciously and explicitly constitutional, in a sense in which the ‘Attlee consensus’ was not. It will have to be concerned, not just with the ends for which state power can be used, but with the way in which power is won and held: not just with the ...”

“... as ‘one of our time’s two or three major analytic intellects’; I am indulging in this self-quotation because the present dust-jacket uses it, in the legitimate hope that ‘the publication of Vindications will help to ensure that, if only after his death, his true stature will eventually be recognised, in Britain as elsewhere.’ What the 32-page ...”

“... It was Friedrich Engels’s The Origins of the Family, of Private Property and the State. Joe’s self-education raised him from his peasant origins to a sense of himself as an intellectually aware member of the industrial proletariat. Muriel’s education was a process of unlearning the attitudes of the Middle-American plutocracy into which she was ...”

“... Walter Benjamin, and from the dependable Emerson: ‘Love is the bright foreigner, the foreign self.’ Here is the touch of wonder required for Rortian aphorism. It isn’t to be found everywhere among the thousands Gross gives us, but there is no dearth of material, the aphoristic mines are not worked out, and we need not fear a shortage of edifying ...”

“... that America was lacking in soul.’ Bettelheim’s tone of cultural superiority and unhesitant self-assurance is nowhere more annoying than in his discussion of the Oedipus complex. After being told that most of his American graduate students have had ‘only the scantest familiarity’ with either the Oedipus myth or Sophocles’s play, Bettelheim treats ...”

“... richly rewarding to American writers. Blue Rise is set in Mississippi, but it is far from being a self-congratulatory old-time wallow. The inhabitants know how quaint their culture is and sell it in antique shops. It is Mississippi revisited, by Jeannine, a young woman who has escaped from it to marriage in a northern city. She is astounded on her return to ...”

“... of the theory he accepted from Wilde, that a writer gains mastery of himself by creating an anti-self or mask and striking through it. Fulfilling the doctrine of the mask, Synge won a place for himself as one of the two representatives of Phase 23 in Yeats’s A Vision – the other was Rembrandt. ‘In Synge’s early unpublished work, written before he ...”

“... deception is fundamental to animal communication; and presumably the best deception is based on self-deception since it precludes involuntary tell-tale signs that might give the deceiver away. Yet to deceive oneself necessarily presupposes that one part of the mind is inaccessible to another. It could accordingly be evolutionarily advantageous that certain ...”

“... aspire to be) junkies, the damage that anorexic and beautiful models inflict on the consumer’s self-image and, on the other hand, the social progress fashion is making by giving stylistic space to those not usually represented in ads. There is comparatively little discussion of the self-esteem or health of the workers ...”

“... is the most important variable. And hardly anyone now believes what seems to me historically self-evident: that the best way of solving a social problem is to throw money at it. What is important here is not that New Labour denies something self-evident, but that the Labour Party, individual exceptions apart, has ...”

“... the other hand, lost at least as many admirers as Cabrera Infante for his continuing (some thought self-interested) loyalty to Castro after the show-trial of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971. And Octavio Paz forced many readers to make an awkward distinction between his political views and his writing when, late in life and in the name of order, he ...”