“... the most memorable creations in his gallery of bien-pensant absurdity was the trendy filmmaker and self-publicist Neville Dreadberg, whose documentary Blood Orange was imagined as depicting the cannibalistic practices of rank and file Ulster Unionists. In a variant on the traditional Ulster fry-up – and Swift’s Modest Proposal – Wharton described ...”

“... then. Phew.’ Phew, and indeed, gosh. He’s less passive about other things. Except for sex, the self-conscious rock and roll wild man is always ready to make his mark. When Robert Stigwood failed to pay up after a series of concerts, he got trapped on a staircase and kneed by Keith 16 times, one for each grand owed. Not that Stigwood apologised (‘Maybe I ...”

“... superficiality of his age, but is unable to have any real feelings for anyone or anything: ‘His self was locked in a nutshell … outside were his shadows, dolls. He saw himself as almost autistic, imitating contact with the outside world, talking to others in false voices to fish out whatever he needed from the Moscow squall: books, sex, money, food, power ...”

“... This boy who has no fixed identity gives way quickly to one with a new and very different sense of self: Ascot, 15 October 1881. Saturday. We got to Waterloo at 2 o’clock whence we drove to the Savoy Theatre in a bus to see Patience, a most intensely utter play in the aesthetic line … After the theatre we walked down Piccadilly without a poppy or a lily ...”

“... people, ‘who one day happened to make love’. Sadie is one of the lucky ones, according to this self-oppressive ideology, except that she has had no familiarity with the context that might connect her with her good fortune. There’s a rather pat scene, after Kweku’s children have arrived in Ghana for the funeral, in which she is singled out and invited ...”

“... his heart. Dickens uses exaggeration and bathos to poke fun at the pretensions of narcissistically self-absorbed young men; Baudelaire – just as effectively – uses overblown Gothic. Over his head he notices a sinister cloud that turns out to contain a group of vicious demons that look like cruel, inquisitive dwarves. They gaze at him coldly for a while and ...”

“... Captain Oates’s departure from Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition, but Gerald’s taciturn self-erasure seemed more appropriate to my social class and discontents than Oates’s stiff upper lip). I thought that there was nothing at all the matter with having ‘a mind of winter’; I could have lived happily in a world of perpetual cold. So when I ...”

“... revealing how, in the magic spectacle of London literary life, he is always able to pull his own self out of the hat. ‘Nikos was eager to show me something he had received from Stephen Spender, in Washington, which is on his desk in the sitting room. “Look,” he said, “a reproduction of Andrea del Castagno’s The Youthful David.” He said he was not ...”

“... inconsolable, she notes, despite the rest of the cast being ‘terribly upset for me’. No more self-conscious than the average 20-year-old, she was more observant than most. There are flashes of vivid descriptive writing and economical touches in the journal that were all too rare in her later work. A solitary walk in the summer dusk ends with a big moth ...”

“... Bible-reading and public sermonising, created a new ethos of conscience and consciousness, of self-scrutiny and inwardness. Such an ideological climate breeds tragedy. It is not for nothing that both Faustus and Hamlet studied at the University of Wittenberg, a Lutheran town. But there is a further historical sense in which Shakespeare was the child of ...”

“... goes, they are having an affair. An interest in underwear is an interest in a hidden, sexual self. Some women find the existence of this secret self very empowering. They feel better in a meeting because no one knows how sexy they are, under their clothes. Is it mad to buy them, or mad to count them? How are they ...”

“... the Magician and his unhallowed abortion are with the boat engulphed in the waves.’ Peake’s self-parody, Another Piece of Presumption, staged at the Adelphi Theatre in October 1823, has a tailor called Dr Frankinstitch who kills his nine assistants in order to construct his creature (on the proverbial grounds that ‘nine tailors make a man’); it ends ...”

“... means satisfying the preferences that people actually have, then it should put other-regarding and self-regarding preferences on the same footing; conversely, if liberalism rules other-regarding preferences out, then it is those preferences, rather than Pareto, which conflict with liberalism. Anyway, it’s hard to see why Sen revisits the debate at all: he ...”

“... the Other becomes the only way of convincing yourself that you still exist’. This is not simple self-assertion. It is a way to cull, by casting it outwards, the dread of being nothing; or nothingness, nullity seen as an object of awareness. In Heideggerian terms, evil exhibits a radical evasion of being-towards-death, the acceptance that Dasein achieves ...”

“... the explanation was thought to be worth discussing but the fact of the matter was taken as self-evident. One of the winning essays pointed to the essential clarity of French sentence structure: ‘That which is not clear is not French; that which is not clear is still English’ – or some other mess of a language. Among the claimants to priority in ...”