“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... senses that Hugo is either a demon inhabiting a doll or the maverick half of Frere’s divided self. The second interpretation explains why Van Straaten will become involved with the police. It’s a mini-masterpiece of modern horror. Cavalcanti, a Brazilian who had joined Michael Balcon’s Ealing Studios in 1940, also directed the Christmas party ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”