“... Board, why should he bother with an essay on its operation during the apartheid regime? It is self-censorship which really rivets his attention: how repression infects writers and turns even their defiance into self-mutilation. Coetzee asks us to imagine the inner world of the writer as if it were a zoo, ‘in which a ...”

“... by the NGOs as they almost invariably push for small-scale ‘local’, ‘democratic’, ‘self-sufficient’ initiatives and ‘public-private partnerships’. Now, however, the collective agenda has become so grand, so sweeping that it cannot be presented as merely a set of demands on the traditional political class. Consider the scale and duration ...”

“... daemon, the imp, the spirit, the all-too-full bladder) to reveal unacknowledged parts of the self. Of course it does; but who else would put it that way? ‘My friend says it’s bad poetry to write a book/And I agree with her/I agree with her … … … … in principle,’ Bird says: she makes only minimal compromises with the formal demands of ...”

“... in keeping her alive. Perhaps because Tillman isn’t a needy writer – she doesn’t perform self-satisfied tricks, she doesn’t concede, her bursts of humour are surreal and self-contained, close to private jokes – Mothercare is a peculiarly un-American book, free of ...”

“... with the Soviet Union. No wonder the nation emerged with an identity problem. After the years of self-delusion, of aspiring only to the best clubs, reality hit rather hard. Nor did Argentina’s friends cover themselves in glory. Jeane Kirkpatrick, then US Ambassador to the United Nations, who championed Argentina as an example of the ‘authoritarian’ as ...”

“... significance of this image within an image is ambiguous. It could be a homage or a further act of self-fashioning or a private joke. I like to think that the two images point to Lanier’s varied artistic roles to come: as sitter in many portraits, a portrait painter himself, a designer and painter of dramatic scenery (the van Steenwyck looks like a stage ...”

“... which I adumbrated in the two previous articles, one which revolves around notions of metaphor and self-creation rather than around notions of truth, rationality and moral obligation, is better suited to such societies. I am not, however, saying that the Davidsonian-Wittgensteinian account of language, and the Nietzschean-Freudian-Bloomian account of ...”

“... keep from other people, but thoughts he is at pains to keep from himself: ‘It is as though the self is no longer the unity he has always taken it to be.’ And a little further on: ‘The I is an organisation that is distinguished by a very curious striving for unification, for synthesis.’ Our versatility in thinking of ourselves as separate from our own ...”

“... his family’s given name, Goldstein, in preference for Cavell; an irrevocable act of symbolic self-renunciation born, he recalls, of a mood of ‘crisis, solitude and looniness’. When, a decade later, Cavell met Austin, the Oxford don offered the Harvard prodigy still another vision of himself, one that enabled him to satisfy certain yearnings inspired ...”

“... may successfully serve as the subject-matter for poetry. Sissman’s great strength was his self-mocking sense of humour. The man who could see the cancer within him as a ‘tissue of fabrications’, or a row of surgical instruments as a ‘service for twelve’ that ‘awaits my flesh/to dine’, was someone from whom the reader would welcome even a ...”

“... keys to the wilful guests.’ What this means, however, is that the quest for the elusive one true self is becoming more urgent than ever before: ‘Is it not possible that the rage for confession, autobiography, especially for memories of early childhood is explained by our persistent yet mysterious belief in a self which ...”

“... in Autobiography and his newly-published confessions H.G. Wells in Love, that he was fertile in self-criticism, but that – except in Tono-Bungay – the self-criticism never caught up with him; it was hardly ever to hand when it was needed. In H.G. Wells in Love (the title is supplied by his son G.P. Wells) he ...”

“... Sartre had a passive, self-centred war, well-suited to his deeply civilian temper, with no heroics and a great deal of free time. He was mobilised in September 1939, served in the East of France until he was captured in the collapse of June 1940, spent nine months as a prisoner of war, then sat out the Occupation in Paris ...”

“... Professor Wasserstein draws attention to ‘a fundamental innocence’ and ‘supreme intellectual self-confidence’ as two salient features of Samuel’s make-up. These characteristics, allied to immense industry and administrative capacity, invite a comparison with a British statesman of an earlier generation, Sir Robert Peel; and they made, as Peel’s ...”

“... Old World as a museum of degeneracy, a permanent exhibition of what most warped and thwarted human self-fulfilment and satisfaction. The New World would show a better way. An export model of ‘the American Dream’ was put on offer for the encouragement of the rest of humankind. However rampant and self-serving its ...”