“... that one of the things about being a child is that you are a parasite of sorts and have to self-righteously brazen it out. I want. They were good at wanting, and I shared much more common ground with them than with my mother when I was three or four years old. Also, they measured up to the magical monsters in the story-books. Grandma’s idea of ...”

“... syndrome, composed of circumstances and behaviour. Your idea of real feelings, and of a real self, cannot intelligibly be applied to any but your own case. Use of the same words about ‘others’ is a kind of pun. This is the concept of mind that Wittgenstein was fighting against in the Thirties. Pears shows how the attack on solipsism prefigures the ...”

“... he wants to avoid. I shall focus more on the first of these devices. Heidegger often uses quotes self-consciously to make subtle distinctions. As Derrida makes clear, Heidegger’s own method of deconstructing the history of philosophy involves putting quotes around the traditional philosophemes like ‘spirit’, ‘soul’ and, in general, any term ...”

“... rock stars come to clean up on the South African circuit so long off-limits to them; endless self-appointed ‘monitoring’ teams from black American universities; old South African exiles like the actor Anthony Sher, the ex-clergyman Cosmas Desmond – now the only white man on the PAC list – and Ronald Segal, once editor of the Penguin Africa ...”

“... to be both in and out of the game, as Whitman put it – to have a private as well as a public self. Mark Twain went to great lengths to impose himself on the crowd, and he was a more successful performer than Messrs Vidal and Mailer, but he was also able to hold a self in reserve. For Hemingway it was all much more ...”

“... who ought to have known better, slavishly followed the American lead. Parsons, who is disarmingly self-critical in his attempts to find out ‘How we got it wrong’, says he deliberately refrained from offering the Shah advice on internal affairs, in case it interfered with the lucrative business of obtaining contracts, especially in the military ...”

“... 1967 her older sister confirmed that the handwriting could have been hers). It is a Pooterish, self-pitying document, whose author laments her failure to win the lottery (‘So I am not going to be rich after all’). Her other regrets include Hitler’s not giving her a dachshund for her birthday and his neglect of her for months at a time (‘So he has a ...”

“... They thought it all was experience.’ The letters show the moment by moment process of self-enlargement, of fiction taking over from reality, of Hemingway braiding himself a style first and then a history to match it. If his family mistook so much of what he wrote for experience, that’s because he set it up that way, signing himself ‘Old ...”

“... but not when he sticks to his mission, part of which is to persuade his audience that only self-deprecation and a lack of curiosity blind them to the fact that the roofscapes and skylines of Durham and Stralsund are the equals of Venice. Some of his favourite stomping grounds are those ‘places as far south as south of the Thames which feel – and ...”

“... were already moving swiftly to turn his ancestral village into a literary theme park. Among the self-appointed guardians of free speech, it was clear enough that Mo Yan’s prize had sent no message to the Party, except maybe one of affirmation. The outcry that followed the announcement seemed to come from another time, recalling debates over Soviet ...”

“... be strong enough to walk unsupported for possibly a month in all’. Blue Nights, a more anxious, self-questioning book than The Year of Magical Thinking, is about fear, Didion’s and Quintana’s principally: fear of being abandoned, of time passing, of losing control, of dying; and about the memory of a time between the mid-1960s and the late 1980s when ...”

“... found in these essentially generic representations but in the more nuanced and largely involuntary self-portraiture of the handwritten page. ‘It befits a merchant always to have ink-stained hands,’ Leon Battista Alberti wrote in the 1430s, and few exemplified this better than Datini. A born micro-manager, he wrote almost all of his business letters with ...”

“... the playwright’s use of metatheatrical tropes by examining the place of the stage and of self-conscious performance in the early modern imaginary across an extraordinary variety of texts, from the classical past through medieval and early Tudor drama, to the repertoire of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The exemplary alertness to the theatrical ...”

“... fire, the writer Daniela Cascella has suggested the neat coinage ‘trancelation’, the state of self-dissolution some translators reach. Briggs very much identifies with Lowe-Porter’s admission that she was a ‘would-be writer who refuses to let go of her translations until she feels she has written the books herself’. In Sympathy for the Traitor, his ...”

“... beyond repression. What these women experience is closer to a wipeout of identity in which all self-knowledge or self-recognition is lost: ‘I did not know who I was any more’; ‘I do not appear to exist’; ‘It is as if you are inside a grave.’ For the migrant woman, as she tries and fails to make sense of an ...”