“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... worst thing he can imagine happening to him. The photograph changed the story for me: Salinger’s self-banishment wasn’t a preference or a whim, it was an existentially critical act of self-protection. I came to think that, like and admire Hamilton though I did, he shouldn’t have written that book: that if someone needs ...”

“... read over or scrumpled up, it is a reflective business. At the moment of composition the loving self and the writing self divide, interrogating each other, recombining only at the moment of signature. Love letters are, of their essence, about absence, the absence of the loved one: but the author’s selves multiply to ...”

“... take them lightly.The chief lumberer throughout the movie is Leon (Thomas Schubert), a man whose self-absorption seems like a parody of itself. Everything the film has him do ought in theory to make him unpleasant and unwatchable, but he just comes across as grumpy and helpless. He and his friend Felix (Langston Uibel) are on a working holiday by the Baltic ...”

“... reckless spending, high living, marital battles, fights with bouncers and cabbies, drunken self-pity and bouts of remorse. Take his courtship of Edith Wharton, one of his literary heroes. At their first meeting, in 1920, he prostrated himself, kneeling ‘at her feet in a showy adulation’. Invited to lunch at Wharton’s French château, he ...”

“... Vanity Fair is a lot meaner than one imagines. Some of Orwell’s impoverishment, to be sure, was self-inflicted: while a few of his fellow Etonians (Cyril Connolly, Harold Acton) were bursting precociously into print, Orwell chose to slave away in Parisian kitchens even when he was coughing up blood, sleep in dosshouses while cadging the odd ten shillings ...”