“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”