“... advising us on our best sexual behaviour (usually called maturity, or mental health or a decentred self). It is indeed, dismaying how quickly psychoanalysis has become the science of the sensible passions; as though its aim was to make people more intelligible to themselves rather than to realise how strange they are. When psychoanalysis makes too much ...”

“... forms, and by seeking individually and collectively to restrain it by means of a philosophy of self-control and a culture of indirection and discretion, at the high price of acquiring a ‘recognisable preferred neurotic style ... obsessional-compulsive neurosis’ (aggression makes you nervous). It would be hard to conceive a more ambitious historical ...”

“... the parties choose ‘rationally’, as Rawls puts it, which means on the basis of intelligent self-interest. However, behind the veil, they do not know what their particular interests are, so everyone’s self-interest has to be stylised in terms of a set of all-purpose or ‘primary’ goods – notably, liberty, money ...”

“... The brain, sick or healthy, is cast in the role of authoritarian ruler, while the rest of the self (‘I had begun to realise, through a combination of instinct and insight, that I was not my brain’) agitates like a band of sans-culottes or dissident Sixties students. ‘No ... it’s the normal brain that’s really damaged. Having a brain – that’s ...”

“... inwards at herself, but never outwards at other people. As a result, she appears both stupid and self-centred, and the most disagreeable attribute he gives her is a perverse puritanism: she has contempt for the normal pleasures of food and drink, a contempt for the chattering and sociable members of her own sex. Penelope Betjeman is kind to her, but ‘far ...”

“... empirical truth. Aristotle was a pioneer, perhaps, in what I believe to be the commonest form of self-deception in science: the kind of attachment to a dearly loved hypothesis that predisposes us (yes, all of us) to attach a special weight to observations that square with and thus uphold our pet hypotheses, while finding reasons for disregarding or attaching ...”

“... and each other as endowed with certain inalienable rights. Not merely is this true: it is self-evidently true (and you cannot readily get truer than that). Nozick himself keeps his cards close to his chest on the matter of what (if anything) does make his initial claim true. But it is a safe inference that his views on the question diverge from those ...”

“... the rather dinky, miniaturist feel of that term – prefers to style it, with characteristic self-deprecation, ‘a very short novel’. Either way, the text takes up less than a hundred pages, and does little to dispel an impression of slightness – in volume terms, at least – in his fictional oeuvre. He has, of course, written a great many other ...”

“... to keep yourself safe ... In short, you can become a little Odysseus, lying, disguising your true self.’) And some of the more interesting contributions (by Charles Martindale, for example, and Vanda Zajko) take the time to reflect on the perils of writing about oneself, and on how far the written self must inevitably be ...”

“... try too hard. The stance of ‘promise-victimised’ was picked up early on. At first, it was a self-defensive social ploy but over the years it was coaxed into a thoroughgoing style: a life-style and a work-style. Observing the dinner-table impact of lordly non-producers like Logan Pearsall Smith and Desmond MacCarthy, Connolly in his mid-twenties realised ...”

“... life among husbands and children and gardens,’ Lilia, who’s 81, reflects. ‘I’ve lived a self-contained life. I’m what you call a happy woman.’ Happy, except for the fact that she’s been ‘arguing’ for 37 years with the ghost of her daughter, Lucy, who committed suicide at 27 and left her child, Katherine, to be raised by Lilia. Lilia has ...”

“... is incisive, apparently insightful and certainly idiosyncratic. His faux-reticent third-person self-criticism established him as a more intriguing figure in readers’ minds than any of the public figures he skewered with practised astringency. Reading it now, the Education seems more mannered and ponderous than Galsworthy and Mann’s sagas, but its ...”

“... know that beneath all exteriors lie subterranean streams and caverns where the private, unknowable self contradicts the stated desires and achievements of the visible life. A biography, these days, must be a tale of the unexpected. Wouldn’t modern readers feel cheated to find that Antonia White and A.A. Milne were wise and devoted parents, or that Larkin ...”

“... must have suspected that there was more to this than meets the eye. Was Catullus parodying his self-importance and the orotund symmetries of his prose? Would he be immortalised as the sort of person who would swallow something this bald? Or were these just paranoid imaginings? Modern readers are in much the same situation, not sure whether we are in on the ...”

“... Shapiro asserts that in Shakespeare’s time literature was ‘rarely if ever a vehicle for self-revelation’, and that ‘autobiography as a genre and as an impulse was extremely unusual.’ It is certainly true that the relation between life and art was then understood very differently from the ways Romantic poets, Victorian novelists or modern ...”