“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”