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 an appalled, withdrawn mind, all the brutalities of the plot as Angelo planned it, turned into a self-betrayal that he has instead experienced.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

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”