“... 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 ...”

“... who had been for a month in prison and crushed and buffeted and loaded with insults, perfectly self-possessed, dominating the Old Bailey with his fine presence and musical voice ... most leonine and sphinx-like.’ Max considered that Gill, the prosecuting counsel, had let Oscar down very lightly; and he commented on the ‘renters’, young male ...”

“... to ‘Julian’s belief in the power of mind to dissolve and transform all impediments to ideal self-realisation, and Maddalo’s dark pessimism about the soul’s blindness and limitation’. What Leavis and Davie resent is that most of Shelley’s poems – except for ‘Letter to Maria Gisborne’ and ‘Peter Bell the Third’, which might have been ...”

“... Yet when she walks out on him, he is released only into a different sense of the same vacancy of self: ‘Nothing happens. It’s as though I’d ceased to exist.’ And what has he ever achieved? ‘At 36 I’m nothing.’ But then the quest to Ireland cannot simply restore him to being someone. ‘Like the man in that photograph, he had once been ...”

“... even easier as American bookstores devote vast acreages of shelf space to ‘Healing, New Age and Self-Help’. Lasch was not the first person to notice that crossing the Founding Fathers’ belief in the right to the pursuit of happiness with a loosely psychoanalytic view of the self had turned American life into one long ...”

“... biography, which will trace the last tormented years of his life.’ Now, we have The Solitary Self, in which these last tormented years are portrayed. However, Cranston died in November 1993, with only seven of the eight chapters completed. Although Sanford Lakoff has done a neat job of finishing off the last chapter and adding an Epilogue on Rousseau’s ...”

“... per capita of any country except China.Identity theft, the electronic appropriation of a file-self for nefarious purposes, is now a well known hazard of the internet. More trivial, but often stubbornly resistant to correction, are the random mutations of file-selves caused by typos in data entry. Of all bureaucratic identity documents, the passport is ...”

“... when he was at work on his poems, he declared radiantly, he was overcome by ‘a sense of being self-prophetic master of the universe’. That empowering sense, a feeling that he had a special mission, ‘an immediate Messianic thing’ involving ‘movements of history and breaking down the civilisation’, had originated nearly two decades ...”

“... female in Baker’s diffidence and defeatism, her alternately good-humoured and anguished self-deprecation. She never achieved more fame in part because she was a woman of nebulous sexuality writing about other women in similar clouds, not to mention about black people and Mexicans. She was too much drawn to the margins. Baker died of cancer in ...”

“... the limits of civility. Yet the revealed will to close down politics, being itself political, is self-defeating. Antigone in Sophocles’ play vainly entreats Creon to bury her brother Polyneices, rather than leave him to rot outside the Theban walls. Given that Polyneices has declared himself an enemy of Thebes, the decision to grant him honorific burial or ...”

“... Memory,’​ my mother remarked, distress masked by her usual self-mocking humour, ‘is a thing of the past.’ She was 85 and sliding into the dementia that would ultimately erase all remembrance. Increasingly haunted by the fear that she had, literally, nothing to say, nervous of gaps in conversation, she would make things up, their frequently bizarre character a reminder that social inhibition is itself a function of deep-laid memories: ‘Oh, the royal family? Of course they suffer from all sorts of unmentionable diseases, you know ...”

“... V., an idealised Vidal, says: ‘In a sense, the only purpose of life is the creation of a self and what matters is the sum total of all one’s attempts.’ There have been many attempts, and many lives. As well as being a novelist, satirist, playwright, essayist, formerly an American abroad now an American at home, Vidal is a television and radio ...”

“... that took account of the new natural sciences: a system in which virtue would be pursued not from self-centred fear of punishment, human or divine, or in expectation of personal rewards, but out of sheer delight in ‘the knowledge and love of God’. He shared some manuscripts with friends back in Amsterdam, and they responded with comments, requests for ...”

“... Lexicon: ‘Staple synonym always available for goalkeeper. Likely to be used with a degree of wry self-consciousness these days.’ Wry self-consciousness, though quite a standby for some of us when it comes to using clichés, is not perhaps an attitude widely shared among football writers and broadcasters, so it’s easy ...”