“... 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 ...”

“... in its subtitle as the biography of its subject, the next best thing is for it to appear as a self-help book. Alain de Botton’s Consolations of Philosophy, a model of its kind, came out in paperback in the spring. Playing, in a manner of speaking, Achilles to de Botton’s tortoise, Nicholas Fearn’s Zeno and the Tortoise: How to Think like a ...”

“... they had better well be timeless, and if they were not going to be linky, they had better well be self-contained.’ In other words, for an anthology of blogs to work, the blogs it contains have to be as unbloglike – as booklike – as possible. Boxer retreats behind an argument about style: all the pieces she’s chosen are ‘distinctly bloggy’, by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the disease becomes a voyage of discovery – about the disease and its treatment – and of self-discovery. The mood not only never touches on self-pity, but makes one embarrassed for having entertained such a thought. Ivan Vaughan is as excited by his experiences, and his reactions to them, as a dog let loose in a ...”

“... around me as a battlefield full of mines that might blow me up,’ Padilla says of his earlier self. ‘I preferred that to the unyielding disease of routine.’ It isn’t easy to distinguish with certitude between a genuine concern for social justice and a love of hearing one’s own voice echoing through the corridors of powerlessness – or between a ...”

“... citizenship by mutation and mutilation, dragged into a windy, see-through, Protestant world where self-acceptance became possible. The boy who once scraped at his skin with a razor to remove the brown – his Indian looks being a source of regret to the family – becomes a man jogging in the sun. But right from the start of the process, communication at home ...”

“... eschew ‘the old critical condescension towards Richardson’ as ‘bourgeois printer’ or ‘self-righteous moralist’. While more than one essayist refers to Ian Watt’s description of Pamela as a ‘mixture of sermon and striptease’, none admits the view to be correct. None, however, sets out to refute it. Instead, there are essays on the London ...”

“... From The Comic Sense of Henry James (1960) through A World Elsewhere (1966) and The Performing Self (1971) to Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977), Poirier has pursued a consistent and inventive enquiry into literary language, and into the politics of literary language. ‘When a writer is most strongly engaged by what he is doing, as if struggling for ...”