“... 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 ...”

“... a trap for Milo, who had been conducting official praetorian business, and that the murder was self-defence. The trial was marked by violence and intimidation: the mob wanted Milo’s head. It’s possible that Cicero lost his nerve and never finished his defence speech; certainly he lost the case, by a decisive vote of the jury, and Milo was exiled to ...”

“... walls, he was ‘Mr Eliot’, an ever courteous facsimile of respectability, a three-piece-suited self desperately searching for forms of orderliness that would make life manageable while shutting out the pain. After a visit to Dublin, he reported to his close friend John Hayward that ‘you would hardly recognise my usually reticent ...”

“... more important’ than the actions themselves is a scandal; it would require a degree of self-absorption beyond even him to be unaware that no motive at all can any longer seem sufficient as a justification measured against the consequences that his actions have helped to bring about in Iraq. The lowest point of this prolonged and empty charade of ...”

“... Most novels, if they come off, are orgies of self-congratulation, shared between the writer and the reader, who unconsciously understand both what is going on and what is needed. To enjoy a novel is by extension to enjoy oneself, and novelists in their various ways accommodate the process. Although the rules are always changing, both sides know the game ...”

“... Sense of Henry James (1960) and A World Elsewhere (1966), through a middle phase in The Performing Self (1971) and Norman Mailer (1972), on to the major study of Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977), and culminating in The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (1987) and Poetry and Pragmatism (1992), now belatedly under review. More perhaps than ...”

“... the Western vocabulary in 1852 (in German) as Alkoholismus – is the consequence of sustained self-medication for, generally speaking, anxiety. As Seneca reports, even Cato ‘soothed his mind with wine when it was worn from the cares of state’. On this account, alcohol is like Xanax: Xanax perfected through millennia of human effort and ...”

“... It’s a funhouse mirror maze, from which one emerges with a conviction that the human self is incoherent, and that reality itself is an unstable aggregate of random perceptions. But the novel itself generates such large ideas out of a historically specific postmodern setting: the many stories it tells all embody the American obsession with ...”

“... England or anywhere else … It is always you.’ There is a sense in Lowry that it is this very self that is being both courted and fled from, a wooing and a flight that involve a willed and reckless search for extreme experience (early on in their friendship Aiken said that Lowry reminded him of ‘a small boy chased by furies’). Through Aiken, Lowry ...”

“... ago as 1951. There’s no such person as Anne, but Gar is still there, looking quite like her old self again, and Mr Burns, none the worse for New Zealand, waiting for us to make up our minds: are we coming with them or not? The afternoon goes on like that until we are piling into the car, trying not to sit in the middle. Isn’t that the anti-carsick chain ...”

“... and of denying the Sixties ever happened. It was an age of narcissism, some said, but we were too self-absorbed to notice. Our nostalgia is really going to have to work hard here. For Julia Phillips, and for everyone else, she says, ‘who thought they were young, decadent and rich in the Seventies’, the Seventies were the Eagles song ‘Life in the Fast ...”

“... the Italian Renaissance witnessed the ‘discovery of the individual’ while Medieval man’s self-consciousness simply took corporate form: ‘Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, a people, a party, a corporation, a family.’ This view is no longer held in its crude state, and sophisticated work by Colin Morris and other Medievalists ...”