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“... Yale Law School, the ‘coolest thing I’ve done’. He attributes his success to old-fashioned self-discipline, which he learned at the feet of his grandmother, Mamaw, and perfected in the marines. Unlike those in his hometown who had kids young, or who were worn down by menial jobs, he fulfilled what he calls the American Dream. By the end of the book, he ...”

“... in the very different notion (although he sometimes runs them together) of mastering your self. When he first employs this formula, he uses it to refer to the thought – equally familiar to students of Plato and of Freud – that the obstacles to your capacity to act freely may be internal rather than external, and that you will need to free yourself ...”

“... out of the Essays, you will remember the kidney stones. Montaigne insists on the veracity of his self-portrait. He writes, he declares, just the way he talks. To keep his book true to himself he will correct only the careless errors, not the habitual ones, so that ‘everyone recognises me in my book and my book in me.’ In a passage added late in life, he ...”

“... just as ambitious. She wanted to use scientific methods to analyse the inner workings of the self, to access the ‘direct sense of what was real in my internal universe’. The problem she wanted to solve in her diary was her own ‘blind fumbling with existence’, and by publishing it as a book she hoped it might be useful for other fumblers ...”

“... of our post-millennial times. Not my words, in fact, but the story’s, which with the streetwise self-reflexiveness of Post-Modernism anticipates, and so disarms, its own critique. At one point the narrator protests that ‘a large majority of us opposes the free, unrestricted migration of imaginary beings into an already impoverished reality,’ which ...”

“... about David Plante recently. Sometimes, I am slumped on the lavatory, glued there by gin and self-pity; sometimes, I am watching The Sound of Music on television and bawling shameful tears; sometimes, I am driving bad-temperedly through the Tuscan countryside, railing foolishly at the world’s treatment of me. Always Mr Plante is at my side: on his face ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 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 ...”

“... lived alone in a house of tin. This intelligent – and again very funny – study of the lonely self seemed to have marked Mills’s maturation point. But The Scheme for Full Employment goes one further still. No one has any character and there is no inner life to be detected. Mills has restricted himself to primary emotions and motivations – even the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”