“... show things as they are – bodies, pain, cancers, vomits, the gruesomeness of dying, the endless self-indulgence of memory – without letting anybody, least of all himself, escape into the cosy world of what he termed Dickensian fiction. Repeatedly he rebuked other novelists for failing to realise that James Joyce was the ‘Einstein of the novel’ and ...”

“... Descartes’s Meditations tells the story of six days in the life of a rather self-important, busy young man who has granted himself a short sabbatical. Quite a few years have passed, he says, since he decided to take this meditative mini-break, and now at last he has cleared a whole week to spend in an isolated house with only his thoughts and memories for company ...”

“... notion of its contested nature might offer both Israelis and the rest of the world a practice of self-examination that would deprive historical agents of the authority of myth. The knowledge thus derived would act as a restraint on the opportunistic rhetoric of the politicians and the believers in a single-minded Zionism, and as a potential alternative to ...”

“... which presented a loosely socialist outlook to the troops, while also envisioning a world of self-rule after the British had gone home. While he was stationed in Gibraltar, his first wife, Lynne, was assaulted by GIs, possibly miscarried, and certainly suffered a long-term gynaecological disorder as a result. She drank. He drank. They went to ...”

“... and Kierkegaard in thinking mostly about other philosophers. They spent their lives detecting the self-deceptions into which their predecessors had fallen, in diagnosing their spurious claims to philosophical knowledge. This left them little time, or inclination, to speak to, or about, society. Sartre tried to combine the kind of writing about other ...”

“... Yeats valued Dante for that stylisation of conflict which he saw as leading to the security and ‘self-possession’ which great poetry must attain. In these ways Yeats sought Dantean power. ‘The supreme artist ... is the supreme intelligence. Like Dante he can pass through hell unsinged ... when he looks into the darkness, he sees.’ This ability ...”

“... to mediate fact and value, objective and subjective, as the young Marian Evans abandons her early self-punitive Evangelicism to consort with fashionable Coventry freethinkers. For Matthew Arnold, it is culture which will inherit the ideological role of religion in sustaining a corporate faith; but Arnold’s ‘culture’ is altogether too lofty and nebulous ...”

“... of William Burroughs, is also one of the Blasted Allegorists, contemporary American artists whose self-important and talent-free doodles about Life, the Universe and Everything are hyped by Brian Wallis in his Introduction, a piece of writing conceivably worse than the pieces it introduces: For the writers in this book, these critical forms, such as ...”

“... himself had scrawled, and then crossed out, on the cover of his manuscript notebook. Eliot’s self-satirising title is comparable to his first, Dickensian, title for The Waste Land – ‘He do the police in different voices.’ Such mocking inscriptions exemplify the way in which he invoked his satiric self against his ...”

“... no tale of emancipation here – feminist historians have shown that within patriarchy this is a self-serving male illusion; and no well-worn labels either. The book’s subject, then, is ‘writings dedicated to imparting to the public teachings about sex – together with their authors, contexts and impacts’. And the story Porter and Hall tell is fairly ...”

“... meanings this is not altogether a disadvantage’. And whether he was thought to be confused and self-deceiving, or vacuous, or even crazy, Crane was such a troubling figure, both before and after his early death, that people were inclined to describe his poetry in a way that cast aspersions on his character; as though such unapproachable poems could only be ...”

“... of her dancing on stage, with snapshots of her among friends and admirers, the show recaptures the self-knowingly playful acrobatics and the heart-stopping clothed elegance of this unthreatening sexual being, a femme vitale but not fatale. How uncanny to find her exhibited in a space that normally serves as an auction house. Josephine Baker for sale: what is ...”

“... seven Wanderjähre around Europe while he tried to be an artist, and pondered the nature of the ‘self’, the ‘I’ and the ‘ego’ in his diary; and then – Vienna. Homburger/Erikson began his psychoanalytic career with a chance tutoring job in the family of Anna Freud’s friend Dorothy Burlingham. He was good with children and highly perceptive, as ...”

“... the most ticklish question of all, how to undo the disadvantages of the poor without denting their self-confidence and damaging their independence. In the wider world, our present agenda has an even more Gladstonian ring: the defence of human rights, the protection of small, faraway oppressed nations, the defeat of piracy and terrorism, the restoration of the ...”

“... was still Sadism. Sade has attracted a bevy of Freudian biographers who have tried to explain his self-destructive course in terms of parental influence. This is unjustly reductive of a man whose temperament was so individual and whose behaviour was so resolutely self-invented. If one must seek a formative external ...”