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“... 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 ...”

“... which would really be more accurately described as a decade and a half of abject self-prostration. Such empire as the Americans have had never of course depended on colonisation, a category disallowed by their own ideology of origins. It depended on something more novel, and ambiguous: the self-colonisation ...”

“... and cannot break The circle of it to see it as it is. This might seem to sanction a solipsistic self-absorption. But only if one assumes that to be inside one’s life is to be inside an essential self. In recent years, the demand for autobiographical frankness has been complicated by the dissemination of the view that no ...”

“... along with his interpretation. How could one not assent to so gentle a request by a speaker whose self-deprecating modesty had already won that part of the audience which had not come starry-eyed to the famous presence.He went on to one of the main texts, Marcel Mauss’s famous, brief Essai sur le don (The Gift). Derrida said the gifts Mauss described were ...”

“... and the original of Miss Birdseye in James’s Bostonians, tartly remarked ‘her all but Hindoo self-devotion to the manes of her husband’ – while her physically delicate and sensitive son grew up both sheltered and indulged by his Manning relatives. An early injury to his foot, which sidelined him for more than a year, intensified a certain ...”

“... changed its nature. The trivial and quotidian were dignified by the attention given them, and the self-consciously important found no place in the novel’s scheme. Towards the end of the book the hero read in his Penguin Marcus Aurelius the gloomy aphorism that human life is no more than sperm and ashes, and felt no sympathy for it. The modest richness of ...”