“... glows with a godly aura. Among the ‘New Hoover Convertibles’ is The New Jeff Koons (1980), a self-portrait which, enlarged from a family photo of the artist-to-be not long after his fateful encounter with the cereal box, also radiates a special wellbeing, here the wellbeing of a middle-class boy circa 1960. Shirt buttoned up, hair neatly combed, young ...”

“... He testifies before Congress in support of Nasa’s Earthlike Planet Seeker programme, a giant self-assembling mirror to be deployed near Jupiter with the aim of detecting habitable planets and alien life. After the coup, the project is scotched along with the NextGen Telescope, $12 billion and thirty years in the making (a device that sounds a lot like ...”

“... not getting through, can stand in the way of the storytelling impulse. If there’s no room for a self-conscious narrator any more, there’s always the self-consciousness of the characters to fall back on: and Lively’s characters, here as in her other novels, are nothing if not ...”

“... the first thirty years of his life – the period that culminated in the writing of The Divided Self, his first and best book – together with a lengthy diatribe on what he takes to be contemporary psychiatry. One cannot but be appalled and angered by much of what is said here. ‘No facts,’ Laing tells us in the introduction, ‘are in ...”

“... and scientific – connected? For Nauman they are all rooted in a fundamental splitting of the self. Almost in a Lacanian way he intimates that our mirror image, however coherent and intimate it might appear, is actually divided and alien, and that narcissism easily flips into aggression. When video art first emerged, Rosalind Krauss theorised it in terms ...”

“... to it honour, peace of mind and the welfare of their children. It is the foundation of their self-worth, despite the daily evidence on every street in every part of town that money does not necessarily reward energy and virtue, or punish stupidity and sloth. Though dimly aware that money is an invention of human beings, they ascribe to it an external ...”

“... 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 ...”