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“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Francesca Woodman began taking photographs when she was 13; she committed suicide at 22. In her self-portraits she is always shadowy, indistinct, half-seen. Her pictures look like dreams re-created, printed onto photographic paper. In one she sits by a table covered in what look like family portraits. The light falls on her pale hands, illuminating ...”

“... an earlier remark that ‘every moment of my life is treacherous.’ This could all sound self-pitying, but Oldman manages another effect: a certain weariness, arising from exhaustion at never not having something sly to say.If we are looking for a storyline, for suspense and drama, or information, then we should probably try another film. Here Welles ...”

“... stories in which she emerged, if not triumphant, at least unbowed. And then, having brought her self-and-history-making up to date, she would go to sleep. At three, Emily abruptly stopped her night talking, nobody knows why. Perhaps she had done with nappies. Perhaps she had sorted out the past tense. Perhaps she found the recorder. More probably she had ...”

“... draped across her ballooning mammaries as if what supports them – the whole roiling, but somehow self-balancing, bladder-work of breast, belly, buttocks, thighs – was a separate person or non-person, whom the woman had learned to be patient with, almost to placate. Maybe ‘giant’ and ‘monster’ are helpful. Maybe not. I look again at the reality of ...”

“... after the deaths of friends and relations. The result is a curiously artless exercise in self-revelation. Strong was a child of interwar Metroland, which he hated. Born at 23 Colne Road, Winchmore Hill, into a landscape of privet hedges, crazy paving and hanging baskets, he was one of three sons of George and Mabel Strong. George was a travelling ...”

“... rights; an acolyte of established male writers who was nevertheless pugnaciously independent; a self-supporting woman of letters, but hopelessly derivative in her own writing. Some of the contemporary views of her are scathing, and she appears to have died a laughing stock of literary Paris. Her greatest achievement – of which she was justifiably proud ...”

“... outside his vocabulary, Mandeville knew the phenomena intimately. A connoisseur of hypocrisy and self-deception, he perceived that all good deeds are tinged with self-regard. Pride – ‘the vast esteem we have for our selves’ – lies at the root of our supposed virtue. Our motives are never pure.Mandeville also ...”

“... who succeeded in getting an education and, eventually, his freedom. Images of freedom, slavery and self-belonging (oikoiesis) recur in his teaching. ‘A slave is always praying to be set free,’ he writes. He evokes the horrors of enslavement by describing the suffering of caged animals and birds that refuse to eat in captivity and starve to death, though he ...”

“... provenance, his argument being that these had a range of application beyond their current, self-consciously technical uses The point was well made in chapters on Medieval and Renaissance literature. Structuralism might seem offensively newfangled to readers trained up on post-Renaissance notions of authorial presence and the unique, individual ...”

“... of what happens to the questioning spirit when it is too easily satisfied with its own answers. Self-regard makes him untrustworthy even in the pursuit of truth. Life has been brighter for his having been around, but for a long time his explanations have not done much more than add to the general confusion. From one who makes so much noise about being hard ...”

“... observes, not quite believing that he is putting right a wrong. The best of Defoe’s poetry was self-consciously rumbustious, and Jure Divino has some snappy couplets. Here are its opening lines: Nature has left this Tincture in the Blood, That all Men would be Tyrants if they cou’d: If they forbear their Neighbours to devour, ’Tis not for want of ...”

“... like a bird’. It is easy to dismiss Emerson as a faded sage, whose vaporous hymns to nature or self-reliance seem less vital than the radical provocations of his friends Whitman and Thoreau. Yet there is nothing sepia about the words he scratched into his journal after the death of his five-year-old son in January 1842. ‘What he looked upon is ...”