“... 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 ‘In Synge’s early unpublished work, written before he ...”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 ...”

“... Taylor and Montgomery Clift, was epic only in the scale of its box-office failure. The chronically self-destructive Clift lost his good looks in an automobile crash during production, and has two disconcertingly different faces at various points in the narrative. Lockridge was so depressed by the scorn that the prize brought him that he killed himself the same ...”

“... She assumed, as Harold Wilson had several years previously, that Hanson was typical of the self-made man, the hard-working puritan who started at the bottom and worked twenty hours a day until he achieved fame and fortune. Like Wilson, Hanson came from Milnsbridge, Huddersfield, but his origins were not quite as humble as his accent might ...”

“... an important part in the forging of this class-consciousness, which was inseparable from ethnic self-respect. Marcus Garvey’s black nationalism, often dismissed as a misconceived irrelevancy in American black history, is here treated with much greater respect as one manifestation of a rising national consciousness which is class-orientated in principle ...”

“... conforming, in her struggle from faith to free-thinking, to a recognisable pattern. But Olive was self-created. It’s true that African Farm is, in some ways, much what might be expected from a young woman in the 1870s, jilted, working as a governess, writing in a leaky farmstead by candlelight. The heroine, Lyndall, is very small, with beautiful eyes (Olive ...”

“... commonly rely upon a concept of desert, which itself depends upon a wholly mysterious concept of self-determination, and I do not see how there is any place for such concepts if, to the extent to which an action is not completely determined by physical or mental causes, it has to be viewed as occurring by chance. On this point I agree with Honderich, who ...”

“... but also because occupation is bad for Israel, for the values of Zionism as a movement of national self-determination and for the social structure of Israel. Occupation has already brutalised Israel, and its prolongation will brutalise it further. So my unease is not with the political implications of the book, with which I generally agree. My unease is with ...”