“... exist, such as the unity of identity and non-identity, as well as some that do (love, poverty, self-cultivation). But he wouldn’t count as philosophical at all for the likes of Ryle. Richard Bourke is a formidably talented political historian whose Empire and Revolution (2015) was a monumental study of his namesake and compatriot Edmund Burke. He has ...”

“... an ‘enlarged forum for experience and exploration’ where the young could be enticed from their self-preoccupations by exposure to varieties of otherness, and in so doing effect their passage from adolescence to adulthood. The unzoned and permeable ‘survival community’ Sennett sketched in 1970 was intended to show how an ‘integration of ...”

“... if he is always fed when he is not hungry but simply troubled, he may evolve a sense – a virtual self who believes – that what he always really wants is food). Ideally, childhood is a series of reciprocal accommodations – or ‘attunements’ as they are now often referred to, in an uneasy mixing of analogies. But however much psychoanalysts go on ...”

“... is at once subject and object of his or her narrative, a fissured soul striving impossibly for self-coincidence, for that magical moment when the writing subject and the subject written of will merge into an imaginary whole. The prototype of this process is Oedipus, the detective in pursuit of the criminal who is himself. Michael Owen starts out as the ...”

“... as legend is less to do with the quality of his writing than with his wilful mirroring of the self-destructive, drug-centred lives led by the rock stars he writes about. Kent made his name in the mid and late Seventies as a strung-out stringer, the suburban boy getting high with Keith Richards, hanging out at backstage drug binges, and – on one ...”

“... global war and double-think acts of terrorism have very nearly erased the line once drawn between self-mastery and self-indulgence. The line was once an enviable statement of human potential against the historical background of centuries of cruel behaviour. Slowly and painfully there occurred a change in manners which ...”

“... the embodiment of Thatcherism, a man who has risen from the ranks of the poor and whose belief in self-help and the virtues of the free market is unshakable. The simultaneous publication of their memoirs therefore affords an interesting X-ray picture of Mrs Thatcher’s governments and of a Tory Party which has altered radically under Thatcher and ...”

“... accounts. The principal exception is at the other extreme: Hannah Arendt’s rebarbative, self-indulgent biography of Rahel Varnhagen, the most celebrated of these Jewish hostesses. Hertz dutifully mentions and a few times cites, Arendt’s book in passing and then moves on. What she moves on to is other historians and a generous sampling of social ...”

“... complicated character, witty and disaffected, veering erratically between arrogance and acute self-loathing, the ways in which he’s attractive aren’t immediately obvious. In the first few pages he describes his reaction to receiving a posthumous parcel from his youngest daughter, who killed herself four months before. ‘I thought Sadie had done ...”

“... that achieved that must be celebrating its triumph; why won’t it let me join in? [Of his self-hatred] This opinion is my only good point. [Of suicide] If you were capable of it, you certainly wouldn’t need it. [Of the TB which was to kill him] It’s a special illness which has been, if you like, conferred preferentially, quite unlike any ...”

“... trends, restraining reckless middle age. The novelty of 19th-century generationalism lay in a new self-consciousness about generational differences, and a desire to discover in them some historical dynamic. The result was a good deal of tediously abstract speculation about the length of a generation, the manner in which it acquired its characteristics, and so ...”

“... After all, their function is to provide myths for scribblers. And who cares anyway? – the self-justifying memoirs of today’s criminals soon turn to dusty junk. Who can blame Biggs for cynicism after his attempt to come clean with the Daily Express and thereby give himself up, only to be instantly betrayed and done out of his agreed £35,000 by the ...”

“... flirtations. Their political compromises, endlessly reviewed, may have exhibited naivety or self-regard. But much of that record is still educative, and the argument did take place under real pressure from anti-semitic and authoritarian enemies. Today, the alleged ‘neo-conservative’ movement around Jeane Kirkpatrick, Commentary and the New Criterion ...”

“... to give us an account of ourselves. The nub of Taylor’s position is the claim that man is a ‘self-interpreting animal’. One way in which a human agent differs from other animals is by the possession of a conception of himself, an understanding of who he is and what he is doing. An agent’s self-understanding is not ...”

“... and personality, is somehow more reassuring and constant than her relation to her own remembered self. Mirror Writing discussed dandyism and style informally, as one of the ways in which identity is constructed. Adorned in Dreams continues and considerably extends this discussion in much more concrete terms. The book is, as she says, an attempt ‘to view ...”