“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and misunderstood. Form is part of the problem. Don Juan’s playfulness and extreme self-consciousness endear it to ambiguity-inclined, sophisticated modern readings; the Spenserian stanza of Childe Harold (Auden called it a ‘disastrous choice’) required of Byron a sometimes off-putting dignity. Other charges go beyond form. Taking Childe ...”