“... for both art and science an encompassing covenant’: the need for a new literature of self-consciousness (‘the theatre has been accustomed to observe how people behave; what might now be observed is people’s observing’); and the need for new literary forms which jettison the dishonesties of tragedy and comedy in favour of a more explicitly ...”

“... insight) into the way the strangest things ebb up From what psychoanalysts now refer to as the self-conscious. It is possibly for this reason that I have been asked To give you the gist of the thing, the – how shall I put it? – the gist.        I was not of course captured alone (Note that as point three) so that I also observed Not only the ...”

“... friend. He will marry their daughter and somehow get them out of the mess. Naturally cynical and self-absorbed, the young man is nonetheless sentimentally attracted to the daughter. But it would be a mistake. Feeling a bit ashamed of himself, but not much, the young man gets up and sneaks off into the night. Chekhov’s plays emerge naturally from his ...”

“... artistic life: reliance on booze, bad temper, the compulsion to exploit, to be both rackety and self-preoccupied. This he doubtless knew too, and there is something more than touching in this comment from his journal: Ida finds subtle and deep reasons for admiring The Fountain. I quickly suppressed my almost Pavlovian sneer at Charles Morgan, and realised ...”

“... glance at India, it may notice some not very attractive features, is deeply resented. But then the self-esteem of the metropolitan bourgeoisie is a fragile thing. ‘Don’t talk to me about poverty and all that, please,’ the bright young trainee at the Indian Express admonishes me. ‘Every country has that. After all, India has survived as a ...”

“... a romantic view of oneself; distinction is only tardily conceded by others. In the business of self-assessment – which was her business – Colette was never far from self-promotion. This endeavour sustained her through three marriages, numerous love affairs, and, more important in her own estimation, 49 volumes, some ...”

“... cosmetics, ‘women’s choice to beautify themselves is particularly problematic, peculiarly self-deconstructing, since this focus on the surface calls into question the existence of any underlying self.’ Hello? ‘Calls into question’ for whom – a bunch of old Roman misogynists? I doubt whether the Roman women ...”

“... into rhetorical and theatrical flights, as if writing monologues for the stage (or witty notes to self). She is vigilant against self-pity and strives for self-improvement, something evident even in early entries: ‘I’m dissatisfied with everything, myself first of all, I’m egotistic ...”

“... more interesting than sex. It’s an account of a highly specific crack-up, and a largely self-inflicted one, though a few of the usual suspects, among them capitalism and the American healthcare system, share some of the blame.Sean records rap tracks and a podcast, but we don’t hear much about these activities. At the start of the book, which runs ...”

“... demonstration was impossible, but people were largely left to their own devices as far as self-education and self-promotion were concerned. Overwhelmed by the possibility of social satire and self-expression, in 1994 Zhu Wen left his comfortable job, determined to become a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the motifs of Taubes’s fiction: a protagonist in a state of eerie suspension; a desire for self-determination coupled with an equal desire to be squashed by something or someone bigger. In Divorcing, Sophie is everywhere and nowhere. She’s a dead woman in a coffin suspended from the ceiling. She’s in Paris, in Budapest, with one lover and then ...”

“... was sparse (it ended at 15, if it ever really began), but he was a furious reader. He was always self-conscious about his peasant origins, and tried to drown them out with a noisy extravagance of opinion, and by proclaiming a Nietzschean aristocracy of spirit. From adolescence, he was obsessively determined to become a great writer; his late teens and ...”

“... to those seen as deprived. Since his theme here is a writer’s destruction of his private self by the hunt for status, the dramatist has to take the self-evidently less successful partner, the poet’s wife, as the feeling centre of the play (the result reverses, that is, such images as we meet in Henry James’s ...”

“... in eighty days, or around the Circle Line in eighty minutes, whether still or still moving, the self is an act of cartography, and every life a study of borders. The moment of conception is a barrier surpassed, birth a boundary crossed. Günter Grass’s Oskar, the mettlesome hero of The Tin Drum, narrates, in real time, his troubling passage through the ...”