“... of emergency or of madness come about, and how adversity in the world modifies concern for the self. Much emphasis is laid on the unconscious activity of the mind, which for Sibiya in Mating Birds as well as for Francesca in Lost Time means horrid imaginings, displacement and a fear of poltergeists. Capitulation is charted: Sibiya awaits execution in a ...”

“... Arts Council, or other such bodies, of the magazines in which short stories often appear, fosters self-indulgence. Certainly this is a term that came to my mind more than once when reading the works under review. For the novelist, experimentation is both demanding and risky, in that his whole enterprise may go haywire and prove unsaleable. The short-story ...”

“... Even in the political fluidity of the Thirties and the Second World War, Bracken, with his self-created and well-advertised mystique as a man of mystery, taxed to the limit the Tories’ appetite for self-made adventurers, already fully tested in the past by such as Disraeli and ‘F.E.’ Bracken, on the face of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence? Alain Badiou has argued that we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced as ‘worldless’: in such a space, the only form protest can take is meaningless violence. Perhaps this is one of the main dangers of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Encompassing’ or ‘Absolute Consciousness’ or Existenz (the mark of a non-objectifiable self, as opposed to mere existence, which allows man to be turned into an object for scientific inquiry) sit uneasily with the often ironic and cynical mindset of our age. Jaspers’s defence of ‘authentic’ human existence had already been powerfully ...”

“... But now Plain Jane has become Beautiful Barbie, she can fulfil her potential and let her true self emerge from the shadows. This is one of the masking patterns which Wendy Doniger discusses in her fascinating book, a sequel to The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade (2000). From an impressively wide range of sources, from Hollywood movies to Indian ...”

“... that it is intentionally so, much in the way the literary journal Harbach cofounded, n+1, is a self-described throwback to the heydays of Lingua Franca and the Partisan Review. It is a work of stridently unexperimental psychological realism, featuring likeable characters with cute nicknames, dramatic events that change people’s lives, easily identified ...”

“... light. The country comes across as a rough, small-minded, land-grabbing settler culture, based on self-serving fictions and violence, forever dogged by feelings of inferiority towards Europe and America. As one of the characters in his last novel, Theft (2006), concisely puts it, ‘We Australians are really shit. We know nothing. We are so bloody ...”

“... but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest’. Europe, in that case, was a rascally place indeed. In Johnson’s England ambitious politicians had been cloaking themselves in patriotism since the 1730s, and George III himself had begun his reign glorying in the name of Briton. Across the ...”

“... underneath. This was who she was now. It felt muddy in her lungs, weird air.Erin passes her low self-esteem onto the narrators of her grim, funny books. In the novella, Maison Close, Amethyst plays foil and adoring public to her brilliant friend Hamlet, the daughter of a theatre critic. The narrator of the novel, Hypergraphia, is a bit-part player in her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... interest in the upbringing of his oldest and most unruly daughter – ‘A child more obstinately self-willed I certainly never came across’ – and Mary was exiled from the family in a succession of more or less unhappy boarding-schools. She was briskly despatched to relatives for the holidays, and only reunited with her parents at the age of ...”

“... to regard the 19th-century Rothschilds as bankers, plutocrats and social climbers than as the self-appointed spokesmen of ‘the Jewish community’. And in the East End of London, the elemental problems of working-class life – birth, survival and death – were essentially the same, regardless of ethnic identity or national origin. If it is difficult ...”