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“... as to why it should live on. For some of them, the subject – a psycho-social entity capable of self-awareness and purposeful agency – was a simple fact: start pretending it isn’t there, and you introduce a virulent strain of fictionality into the world. Others, however, made precisely the opposite point, that to insist on the death of the subject was ...”

“... Liberal thinkers are keen on self-criticism, a necessary discipline for those who don’t accept intellectual authority. But it can have embarrassing moments, when too much is stripped away and exposed. Most of the essays in Public and Private in Social Life explore aspects of ‘the familiar liberal conception of public and private’; three are ‘external’ critiques of liberal thought, and three describe related distinctions drawn in distant cultures ...”

“... when seemingly most directly rooted in reality; they yield a series of images, of kaleidoscopic self-projections, but allow us to draw no conclusions about the inner life of the author, apart from the obvious one that the instinct for self-revelation and the instinct for ...”

“... can wait for less demanding times. All this is finely done, but she gives most of her attention to self-conscious hypocrites, or at least to those who do not have to look very far to detect their own dishonesty. One of her favourite authors, Moliére, provides a gross instance, Tartuffe, and an example also of the destructive hatred of hypocrisy, in ...”

“... that comes from Plato into the Christian tradition. This world picture, contributing to human self-assurance, prevented men educated in our traditions from seeing the biosphere as it is, until very recently. In fact, civilised human beings are remarkable among animal species for being sex-obsessed, and for their habits of indiscriminate killing and wanton ...”

“... there represent a Modernist textual teasing or a baser vanity; whether his walk-on parts are self-mocking or aggrandising. In City of Glass, the first volume in the New York Trilogy, the writer’s identity is always a plaything: Quinn, the writer, uses the pseudonym William Wilson, who himself writes about the improbably named Max Work, and is mistaken ...”

“... tension, frustration, and the inevitable aggression against the object of desire, but also moral self-doubt and, in the case of puritans, self-hatred.’ (And women? Well, ‘women suffer in their own way from sexual conflicts, but the result is not anti-male hysteria.’) In Melanesia and parts of Brazil, women are not ...”

“... or assisted suicide. A physician may not, in most jurisdictions, administer or prescribe for self-administration a lethal drug for the purpose of ending life, even at the explicit request of a fully competent patient. Yet a physician is legally permitted (sometimes legally required) to take other steps that hasten death, if requested to do so by the ...”

“... of maths problems. In ‘Free Fruit for Young Widows’ a grocer recounts to his son murders of self-defence committed by his friend, an Israeli philosophy professor, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and during the Sinai War of 1956. Halfway through the telling the boy thinks: ‘Nice story … Sad. But also happy … Survival, that’s what ...”

“... took these features as evidence of Hirshfield’s ignorance and limited technical abilities; a self-taught artist, the critics argued, he probably couldn’t paint either lion or face so decided to keep the ones he found. In Master of the Two Left Feet, Richard Meyer tries to show that these compositional strategies actually reveal Hirshfield’s knowledge ...”

“... whatever’ – but it’s obvious to everyone around him that his moist desperation and air of self-congratulation are to blame. Some of the more unjust rejections in Tulathimutte’s work are the product of sexual racism. The masturbauteur in Private Citizens, a programmer called Will, complains that he is ‘pigeonholed as another Asian castrato’, and ...”

“... of which may have given him ideas – then the difference comes from the degree of intellectual self-consistency. Amis writes with a kind of working self-knowledge that brings him closer to the earlier and classic masters. His larger ‘artistic’ capacities, that is to say, can only be defined paradoxically as a larger ...”

“... reconciled, like Belial and Mammon. In life, they were a family of sportsmen whose only sport was self-interest, who made up in neuroses what they lacked in achievement, who relied upon ferocity rather than feeling. Without the light which the falling Oscar distributed upon them, they would have remained in obscurity. Brian Roberts may well have stumbled upon ...”

“... it was the amusement of a child and a devil.’ Wilde’s laughter mocked Gide’s faith in self-affirmation, his belief in a sexual conversion experience. For Wilde, the notion of a fixed identity, a deeper nature, was a delusion, and the celebration of this ‘authentic’ self, even a defiant homosexual ...”

“... of him from photographs. He was not himself a Nietzschean personality – too reticent, too self-absorbed, unconcerned with the Classical past or with overcoming the present. And although Spilliaert saw Munch’s work in Paris in 1904, Munch’s attempts to find pictorial metaphors for human relationships and emotions, particularly sexual ones, seem not ...”