“... He argues that where the mainstream reader would have enjoyed an ultimately consoling drama of self-reliance – the story of a decision reached, for better or worse, and its consequences accepted – the avant-garde reader would have detected a far from consoling essay on the dissolution of subjectivity. ‘For a ...”

“... with a particular history. There is something parochial about these New Yorkers even in their self-searching self-laceration. But then the point of the story – and its method – is precisely that anyone’s consciousness is constructed out of what’s local, what’s near at hand. A dark stream of pessimism flows ...”

“... the poetry conveys its most potent sense of Thomas’s elusive selfhood at the very moment that self nears the brink of dissolution. This dissolution is far from the ‘extinction of personality’ recommended by Eliot in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, which came out two years after ‘Old Man’ appeared in An Annual of New Poetry. Eliot argued ...”

“... of discussion off the table. Honour itself is not a patient word, and Empson also liked to talk of self-respect, as in the following brilliant passage from Seven Types of Ambiguity: people, often, cannot have done both of two things, but they must have been in some way prepared to have done either; whichever they did, they will have still lingering in their ...”

“... scheming or contriving’ – that ‘infinitely’ telling us that we are hearing his own proud self-estimation. So ‘unconsciously’ means not noticing something in himself. The evasive double negative (‘nor perhaps refrain’) emphasises his refusal to admit his own calculations to himself. We would now probably say that his motivation was ...”

“... and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) – had made use of its large majority to write a self-denying debt brake into the German constitution. If Berlin was to regain fiscal credibility, it needed to reverse the huge deficits run up during the financial crisis. Merkel’s new finance minister would have to rein in the financial demands of the ...”

“... the name of its author), an apologia, a covert message to the Happy Few. The letters qualify the self-revelations of the Education and fill in its gaps. They don’t ‘tell all’ – that wasn’t Adams’s style – but they do trace the changes in his fortune and disposition, how he came to be ‘Henry Adams’. Some merely record encounters with ...”

“... of the ironies is that these extremes are in many ways mirror-images of one another. The lack of self-confidence exhibited in the arrogance of their rhetoric and actions is only one of the common actors. We see it again in the demand, and the need, of each side to hold all power in their own hands, in the anxiety to have political structures made in the ...”

“... A university and a faculty widely regarded as the most conservative in the country have elevated a self-proclaimed Marxist. Some, no doubt, will quip that Marxism is the latest of the lost causes to find a last home in Oxford. One newspaper columnist has implied that it must be the end of civilisation as we know it when one of the two or three most prestigious ...”

“... those three lines from ‘Class’ in the first person, rather than that impersonal but also self-addressing ‘you’. ‘Tramontana at Lerici’, a poem from about the time of the Lubbock incident, begins in the second person. This ‘you’ with ‘might’ and ‘should’ in attendance allows speculations about the sort of experiences anyone could ...”

“... then tackle our own deficiencies. The last of those problems is to a great extent a measure of our self-confidence. The British or, as they used to be known, the English, who are in fact the group most closely concerned, were for many centuries without an inferiority complex. This ‘complacency’ carried with it a number of unattractive characteristics, but ...”

“... of the Diaspora are restored to potency by nationhood; there they acquire their full capacity for self-transformation; the Jews, just like Henry, have a right and a duty to begin again, to slough off being low-profile in a Gentile world and seize their counterlife. Such ideas – since this is a novel, and since its protagonist only has to hear one ...”

“... advancement of Christ’s Kingdom among Boys and the promotion of habits of Reverence, Discipline, Self-Respect and all that tends towards a true Christian manliness’. By 1900 the Brigade had attracted 75,000 boys and 409 officers, and had inspired comparable organisations among Jews, Catholics and Anglicans. The boys were offered a reasonably cheap ...”

“... they were always agents, often defeated but never passive victims bewildered by the new. Perhaps self-enabled by the ‘politics of mana’ which characterised the aggressive competitiveness of iwi culture, they took initiatives in greeting the new forces brought by the Europeans and appropriating them to their own perceived needs. They took to ...”

“... the child’s earliest bonds with its mother, whom the infant experiences as inseparable from the self, and the child’s growing capacity to develop relationships with other people who will be experienced as separate beings. The infant knows transitional objects as almost inseparable parts of the self and, at the same ...”