“... 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 ...”

“... and plants, and what seems like the entire lexicon of Chinese medicine. There is an odour of self-congratulation in the dictionary’s emphasis on science, and certain Chinese inventions, such as the seismograph, are written up at some length. Older Chinese dictionaries illustrated usage with tags such as ‘the filial son grows from the end of the ...”

“... fantasy and gratification, as of female preoccupation, defensiveness, embarrassment and self-awareness. Not only does the real North American man show himself as a tit-man but the real woman is a tit-woman. In the pop annals of the transatlantic sex war, we have often heard the male denounce the archetypal woman as a ‘ball-breaker’. It now ...”

“... is not unaffected by that of Konrad, hero of a poem by Mickiewicz. Between the remembered self and the writing self there were peculiar and painful tensions. A chivalric code coexisted with a deep Victorian pessimism; the emotional extravagance of the letters with the minute and painful labour of the novels; the ...”

“... Philip Gaskell, undermines this monist doctrine in From Writer to Reader (1978), where with self-conscious editorial quixotism he sets out to ‘establish’ the text of Stoppard’s Travesties. Using the playwright’s working script, various rehearsal and stage production recordings and the printed text. Gaskell convincingly demonstrates that ...”

“... is to say, he does not believe that our only authentic knowledge of the true God is that God’s self-revelation, a self-revelation to be received only by faith. But he equally repudiates the natural theology of neo-Thomism and indeed of St Thomas himself: ‘There is ... no two-level reality, consisting of a ...”

“... such a confusion of impressions that it threatened to collapse the boundary between the self and the world outside. To avoid psychological breakdown, the urban dweller had to become ‘blasé’ – less an attitude in Simmel’s account than the result of the ‘incapacity to react to new stimuli’. Modern life required people to develop a ...”

“... about its associations with the Anglocentric arrogance of what is sometimes called Whig history, a self-satisfied celebration of England’s relatively smooth progress towards liberal outcomes. The historical reaction against Whig triumphalism also exposed the intellectual limitations of constitutional history as a means of apprehending the past. Between the ...”

“... sacred authorities? A celebration of friendship in the classical sense of the friend as a second self? A memorial to the Nuremberg Treaty of 1532, by which Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, legally acknowledged the existence of Protestantism for the first time? A commemoration of Anne Boleyn’s coronation in Westminster Abbey on 1 June 1533?Acquired by the ...”

“... 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 ...”