“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the later part of the 20th century will have heard the word repeatedly in the context of a falsely self-deprecating joke. It suggests that those who live in so-called underdeveloped places know when things don’t work, it’s part of their life. A lot of things don’t work in the developed world either, but there no one seems to notice. It’s also possible ...”

“... airmen were quickly rejected by the body. His work introduced the concept of a biological ‘self’. He found that the patient’s immune system not only recognised the ‘non-self’ tissue of the graft but saw it as a hostile intruder and tried to destroy it. This led to the development of drugs to suppress the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... inner space was barren and haunted. The marvellous thing is that the barrenness brought him not to self-denial or self-hatred but rather to a kind of tense curiosity about every Jewish phenomenon, especially the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Yiddish language, the Yiddish theatre, Hasidism, Zionism and even the idea of moving ...”

“... of relativism, for the same has been and will continue to be true of all historic proclamations of self-evident and universal truths. After all, the two most self-evident truths of life on this planet are that the earth is flat and that the sun goes round it. The truth that all men are created equal was far from ...”

“... he understands are used by street gangs in Los Angeles.] Also due in March is a memoir called Self Abuse by Jonathan Self. Whether or not he may have any famous relatives is hinted at in the John Murray catalogue, which tells us that Self’s father, ‘Professor ...”

“... in German.’ He worked with the utter absorption that would always mark his greatest periods of self-discovery, and not for the first time Dorothy worried that the strain of making verses was making him ill. Wordsworth was writing with troubled urgency, as though his poems were a necessary psychological bulwark: ‘As I have had no books I have been obliged ...”

“... a year, as hope of relaunching his invasion of Venezuela dwindled and with it his credibility and self-respect. Raleigh and Miranda: ‘obsessed men, well past their prime, each with his own vision of the New World, each at what should have been a moment of fulfilment, but really near the end of things, in the Gulf of Desolation’. Raleigh and Miranda are ...”

“... of the Common Programme of the Left, in 1972, as the crucial moment at which a whole range of self-identified leftists, from older progressistes to anti-Soviet gauchistes, suddenly begin to wonder, at the prospect of an electoral victory finally bringing the Communist Party to power, whether that was really what they had in mind after all. I also take the ...”