“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as ‘a listing iron helmet on a painted stick’. But, in general, his prose seems, if not quite self-parodic then tending towards self-karaoke. All Banville’s distinctive tics are on show. As usual, the vocabulary is intrusively broad, featuring, among others, the words ...”

“... changed – and is played by Will Poulter, displaying an impeccable rage and an amazing mixture of self-control and self-indulgence. Also in town a group of doo-wop singers seems to be about to get its first real chance with a live audience, but doesn’t because the spreading of the riot forces the theatre to close. The ...”

“... than seventy pounds; Josie, a graduate student in economics, is far advanced along the line of self-starvation. Anorexia nervosa has her in its grip. She has gone far beyond temperance – the observation quoted above needn’t seem all that askew if you take it as a prescription for vegetarianism, not near-abstinence – into some ferocious realm of ...”

“... its natural phenomena ‘were becoming his deepest source of solace’. Eddie is aware of ‘the self which, he felt sure, was in process of being born, and which was the reason he had chosen a manner of life on the whole distasteful to him’. An affair with Marcia, the owner’s wife, is followed by an episode with the station manager involving mutual ...”

“... of the writer that he can contemplate without feeling embarrassed by his conceit or ashamed at his self-indulgence. Rousseau is often accused of being self-indulgent even or especially when he is accusing himself of vile deeds: as when he tells how, to save his face, he lied about the theft of a ribbon and so got an honest ...”

“... You might think that Adam Thirlwell, as an author of self-absorbed sex comedies, had no obvious credentials for writing about the Arab Spring (the title of his first novel, Politics, was a joke). But according to the narrator of his avant-gardeish new novella Kapow!, his lack of knowledge about the subject is what makes the project so interesting and avant-gardeish ...”

“... and the sense of superiority that her sanity gives her over her husband fills her with ‘self-loathing’. Even so she can’t bear the thought of the unromantic forms she knows his degenerative disease will take. ‘One day his features would crumple, he would let his jaw hang open.’ She kisses his hand as he sleeps, and says: ‘I’ll kill you ...”

“... Marxist vision of the future. But there is a human need different from and as deep as the need for self-development, which this perspective ignores. It is the need for self-understanding and self-definition, satisfaction of which is sought by identification with others in a shared ...”

“... than the other. American students did not. The extension to perceptions of people is almost self-evident. If members of one group think of themselves as a group and believe that members of another are more aggressive or sexy or lazy or cunning or whatever, they will assess them accordingly. Their own sense of themselves as a group is intrinsic to their ...”

“... dissociation Estela feels when she arrives at the Jensens’ is compounded over years. Her real self is back in the south with her mother. The life she is leading now – holding another woman’s baby, washing the underwear of someone else’s husband – grows more trance-like as time passes.In the Jensens’ home, Estela thinks ‘very clearly: this is a ...”

“... never lets the left off the hook, showing that many anti-fascists were involved in promoting these self-absolving tropes. Communists often claimed that the Italian people had been almost entirely anti-fascist, and that most of the blame for the disasters of the war lay with individuals – above all, Mussolini – and, of course, the bad Germans. Italy’s ...”