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“... in power. We prefer oppositional politics; we would rather ‘speak truth to power’ (as we self-praisingly call it; am I the only person whom that phrase nauseates?) than exercise it. We are always against force; we are always quick to denounce a compromise, declare a sell-out, announce an apostasy. At the bottom of this there is, I think, the fact ...”

“... in particular; it is also that to bow our minds submissively to the actual requires a humility and self-effacement which the clamorous ego finds hard to stomach. It is an unglamorous business, distasteful to the fantasising, chronically self-deceiving human mind. Seeing things for what they are is, in the end, possible only ...”

“... a little shaky. Besides, representationalism has its limits. If the source of representing is the self, it is doubtful whether the self can be captured within its own view of the world, any more than the eye can be an object in its own field of vision. In picturing the world, the ...”

“... meaningful cosmos, and the very idea that it could incarnate the divine comes to seem self-evidently absurd. Not that anything in human affairs is ever self-evident. Ceroplasty and the vascular injection of fixatives and dyes remained mainstays for teaching anatomical structure into the 20th century. There is ...”

“... isn’t, properly speaking, something that happens to us. It is, rather, the nullification of the self as experiencing subject. How then can death be a bad thing for the person who dies? What is there to be afraid of? We tend to speak of ‘the fear of death’ as if it were a single particular thing, but that is to obscure the diverse terrors death ...”

“... Literature (1910); ‘there is also something unbridled, a spirit which breaks all bounds of self-control and runs riot; and there is also a stubborn element, a tough obstinacy.’ According to William Lyon Phelps, of Yale, in his Essays on Russian Novelists (1911), ‘your true Russian’ is notable for humility, love of theory, paralysis of the ...”

“... world, even bored. Some are friends (two are lovers), most are allies, collaborators, members of a self-selecting elite or avant-garde; and yet there is very little interaction between them. None of the figures touches his neighbour; they may abut, overlap, hide behind one another, but there is no contact between them. It is almost as if they can’t wait for ...”

“... The book discusses the relationship between ‘the star’ and ‘the fan’, the critic being a self-conscious version of the latter. Lawrence considers how we read a performance, a face, but more how we respond to it. Clift is the test case for her arguments, and given the complexities of his career and fame, he proves to be a very good one. In his first ...”

“... The War allowed me to project, – to EMBODY, – an ultimate ‘aspect’ of the ‘self’ … Such extreme typesetting reflects extreme states of mind: the speaker here is the great dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, depicted in 1919 as he goes mad. If you read the books in order you will also learn early on about Bidart’s early life. Raised far from ...”

“... same pattern: Carrère takes a character or set of characters and through lengthy digressions and self-reflection finds something both personal and universal in their struggles. He likes to call his books ‘non-fiction novels’ and cites In Cold Blood as his inspiration. But Truman Capote, who used the term himself, always stressed the author’s ...”

“... envelope of shit arrived through d’Offay’s letterbox. In one version of the philosophy of the self, we all operate at some point on a line between the twin poles of episodicism and narrativism. The distinction is existential, not moral. Episodicists feel and see little connection between the different parts of their life, have a more fragmentary sense of ...”

“... them to reveal whether they are taking the shortest road. Finally, he descries my unworthy self upon the road; and, instantly stopping his flying equipage, he demands of me (as one whom he believes to be a scholar and a man of honour) whether there is not, in the possibility of things, a shorter cut to Keswick. Now, the answer which rises to the lips ...”

“... omitted from, but appertaining to, earlier and perhaps weightier writings. A remarkable air of self-confidence informs the work of this author. Long before the old men of Stockholm bestowed their accolade on him (in 1981), Canetti wrote with the authority of one determined to make his readers take him at his own valuation: he saw himself as a major German ...”

“... that’s so, it may have to do with the intensity with which my fiction has focused upon the self-revealing dilemmas of a single, central character whose biography, in certain obvious details, overlaps with mine, and who is then assumed ‘to be’ me.The Ghost Writer was automatically described in the press as ‘autobiographical’ – which means ...”

“... yet I play this game only to thaw That icy stare, because I’m still in awe Of your most private self, that self you spill Into the poems you keep locked away ... On his way home from India in 1947, MacNeice stopped in Egypt to see the sights and was observed to gaze for a long time at the Sphinx: ‘Francis Worsley ...”