“... 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 ...”

“... burning issues of our time: tenured radicals, date rape, the aesthetic evolution of Madonna. The self-styled genius and warrior woman seized public attention with her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), a sweeping, Strindbergian analysis of culture as the war of the sexes. But what really made her famous ...”

“... business, cash, acquisition, goods: or, in Jeffrey Ashcroft’s description, ‘shopping lists … self-aggrandisement … sexual intrigues’. Much of Dürer’s time was spent attempting, and often failing, to satisfy his friend’s acquisitive desires, which took very specific forms: fine paper, enamelled glass, a sapphire ring in a small sealed box ...”

“... health for most of his life. The knowledge that he might not live long intensified the urge for self-preservation. His Journal documents ‘a titanic struggle between consuming ambition and adverse fortune’. It was a miracle that he reached the age of thirty. In the early diary entries, which begin when he’s 13, the naturalist dominates. Many are ...”