“... of modern Britain and that of previous centuries lies in our apparently insatiable appetite for self-serving political memoirs. Until this century, the genre was decidedly unfashionable – much less so, for example, than in France. It would have been considered disreputable for any 17th or 18th-century English politician to leave the kind of memoir written ...”

“... a pretty unlikely proposition. Coming second is a more reasonable ambition, because only your own self can really be relied on to put you first. This is a discovery everyone makes sooner or later: if sooner you may end up a little bitter and twisted, but you will avoid great disappointment; if later you will almost certainly take to your word-processor and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... headlong gallop into problems as complex and intractable as language, altruism, religion and human self-consciousness itself. The puzzling question about language, as Darwin observed, is why linguistic ability hasn’t evolved in other apes as well as humans. In both humans and other primates, there is a correlation between increasing group size and increasing ...”

“... it will not be possible to exonerate her from the ultimate charges of corruption and betrayal of self ... The genius is the only type of human whose agenda is pure enough for his [sic] motives to be incontrovertible. Lillie was not a genius.’ One of these women devoted her accidental gift of beauty to carving out a vivid, hectic and erratic life of her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”