“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... I’ll sleep instead on your rug, be your boy, just ask me to spread my legs, I’ll spread’ The self as teenage prostitute, as body for sale, physically open for inspection, becomes the self-appeasing, self-delighting soul who finally writes the poem, and delights in its internal ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”