“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Whack – who work outside the big label system. Doom was a desperado, a dastardly fellow, a self-proclaimed ‘bastard’ who rapped with an incredible urgency and a laconic lilt. He could sound like an album of Mitch Hedberg one-liners played at double speed. He was both ‘out of pocket’ (unhinged and wild) and ‘in the pocket’ (totally cool and ...”