“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an appalled, withdrawn mind, all the brutalities of the plot as Angelo planned it, turned into a self-betrayal that he has instead experienced.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 ...”

“... political life, as well as about the many ways in which individual rationality may be collectively self-defeating. But there is more to politics than individuals acting out of calculated self-interest: both calculation and self-interest may be conspicuously lacking. Consider, for a ...”

“... themselves, even while the images from Abu Ghraib suggest that there is no foundation for such self-serving discriminations between them and us. Perhaps one of the most shocking things Freud did in Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego in 1921 was to cut from an image of the ‘masses’, not far from that of an uncontrollable mob, to the church and ...”

“... of dialogues with the psychotherapist Arabella Kurtz in which they ruminated on the nature of the self. Coetzee’s contributions are attractively hesitant and undogmatic. He puts his ideas forward tentatively, as if puzzled by what a lifetime of reflection has disclosed to him. He admits to having no direct experience of therapy but is clearly knowledgeable ...”

“... you as a bit of a character. As newspapers become less important, however, journalists become more self-important, especially the ones that report from the front line of their own lifestyles. I don’t mind these delusions of grandeur. I like all the mythology. I like hearing of the bitches and the bastards. I’ve worked for some of them. I mean, what would a ...”

“... propaganda, it is hard to withdraw, or collapse with laughter at the vision of one’s own ghastly self. We are always re-educated, and very rarely re-educate ourselves. Certain themes in the life and work of Sigmund Freud, of the LSD prophet Timothy Leary, and of the more strident feminist authors, of whom Andrea Dworkin is undoubtedly one, give glimpses of ...”

“... amends the quasi-autobiography with good judgment and reasonable candour, but it relies heavily on self-revelation in the novels, and is rather short on concrete detail. R.L. Purdy’s invaluable Bibliographical Study (1954) gives far more than its name implies, and is packed with biographical information. And innumerable references to Hardy, pen-portraits and ...”

“... that it is. As he has explained in what he has written about Chicago and about the bewildered self-contempt of blue-collar workers in Boston in the late 1960s, and as he has most elaborately argued in The Fall of Public Man, Sennett believes that the collapse of an imaginatively and practically robust public life in the United States has left a ...”

“... autobiography as a literary genre and part of which is peculiar to Professor Quine and his idea of self-knowledge and of self-revelation. Anyone who publishes an autobiography to some degree necessarily strikes a pose, takes a line, and launches himself into a chosen style of ...”