“... 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 ...”

“... were becoming commonplace in discussions about politics, education, the mind and the self. Alone Together is not the work of someone hostile to technology’s advances, but Turkle has described it as ‘a book of repentance’: she is atoning for the things she missed or got wrong in her earlier, sunnier work on computers and people.Turkle ...”

“... du Camp, ‘rather than try to rush through even one sentence before it is properly ripe’). This self-flagellating devotion accounts in large measure for Henry James’s view of Flaubert as the ‘novelists’ novelist’. He did not necessarily mean it as a compliment: Flaubert’s cultivation of craft, James thought, went hand in hand with a thinning of ...”

“... first place. Roy reverses many of our assumptions: neo-fundamentalists are individualistic (‘the self, and hence the individual, is at the core of the contemporary religiosity’); ‘the real genesis of al-Qaida violence has more to do with a Western tradition of individual and pessimistic revolt for an elusive ideal world than with the Koranic conception ...”

“... If Connie is lying to herself (and she is) we shouldn’t be surprised: deWitt has made self-delusion his stock in trade.Ablutions, like many books in which people are depicted as disgusting, dangerous, self-serving and beyond redemption, didn’t sell well. In an interview with the Guardian, deWitt expressed his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... MLA convention paper on ‘Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl’; some critics mock the self-centredness of her writing (‘simply to publish a memoir of one’s own psychotherapy requires grandiosity of a certain kind,’ one reviewer protested). Sedgwick is also noted for her extraordinary writing style. She is celebrated for her lists and ...”

“... to the Other – to my linguistic community as a whole – before it can belong to me, so that the self comes to its unique articulation in a medium which is always at some level indifferent to it. Who, then, wrote the first poem? If poetry, like potholing, is a practice governed by certain public conventions, then surely those conventions had to be always ...”

“... to disqualify him from presenting himself as an eternal and uncompromising rebel. What made this self-presentation so irresistible a target was Bourdieu’s certainty, repeated in book after book, that scholarship boys from lowly provincial backgrounds will invariably sell their souls to the institutions which elevate them, and that their claims to ...”

“... object pleasure not truth’, and his particular conception of Imagination as an internal and self-enclosed harmonisation, ‘extends and elaborates the Kantian analyses of the aesthetic experience’. McGann favours poets with a more activist or ‘illocutionary’ conception of their art: Blake rather than Wordsworth, or the Language poets rather than ...”

“... genealogy. But instead of Said’s relentless polemic, Chakrabarty’s book features critique and self-criticism in equal measure. For me, Chakrabarty has the edge here, because for Said the Orient is a Western construct, an instrument of domination: he doesn’t – and never went on to – explore the profound ways in which modern Orientals ...”

“... just people! Yet I still feel the solution ‘something crucial’ was the right one. My son’s self-confidence is perhaps inherited. At which point the sunlight enters the room and falls across my computer screen. This is always infuriating. I can’t see anything. Since this room has no curtains I will have to pull the shutters to and work in artificial ...”