“... and as a reaction to colonial rule and its demise in 1960. Rather than the manifestos and self-conscious rejection of inherited tradition seen in European art, Nigerian modernism – insofar as one can generalise about such a heterogeneous period – saw artists attempting to make sense of the convulsions of the 20th century while variously embracing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an appalled, withdrawn mind, all the brutalities of the plot as Angelo planned it, turned into a self-betrayal that he has instead experienced. This is the ‘eminent body’ thinking. In All’s Well, Diana refers to the bed trick supposedly involving herself and Bertram as the act of being ‘embodied yours’. On this occasion the metaphor is presumably a ...”

“... calls out Background! and hired New Yorkers begin to pass behind the perfect field, a little self-conscious, skaters and shoppers too slow to convince, so they try it again, Clarissa passing the sandblasted arch bound in its ring of chainlink, monument glowing grey against the grey. * A little less now in the world to love. Taxi on Bleecker, dim ...”

“... The world before 1914 was not, Hull insists, a Hobbesian world of autonomous states driven by self-interest alone but a specific legal order, bound by treaty and not simply alliances, and constrained by an evolving and expanding corpus of international law. Painstakingly negotiated agreements governed many aspects of international relations; the doctrine ...”

“... there’s ‘no cognition’, he insisted, ‘which does not presuppose the actual presence and self-givenness of things’. Philosophy, as he once expressed it, is a ‘soaring’, in which the entire person seeks to be at one with the essences of things in their essential relations. This was not to say that there was no place at all for ...”