“... with pioneering the ‘essay’ genre, Montaigne’s Essais, as Rigolot sees them, are a shifty, self-incriminating punishment for transgression: with a ‘Sisyphus-like fate, they are doomed to become a body of endlessly rewritten texts.’ Why so? Because the ‘primal scene’ of the Essais was the death of Etienne De La Boétie, Montaigne’s Hallam. The ...”

“... flat ‘under false pretences’, yet that this was ‘not a lie, not entirely’. As the anxious, self-questioning, third-person, present-tense narrative takes hold, it is preoccupied with discovering ‘the real thing’ – in love, in writing, in national identity, in the self. Evidently, if this is an autobiography, it ...”

“... mood strikes you both, your nights.’ The pretext for the second person is that ‘this book is a self-help book. Its objective, as it says on the cover, is to show you how to get filthy rich in rising Asia.’ But the device is contradicted before it has even been enunciated: the first sentence of the book is ‘Look, unless you’re writing one, a ...”

“... negative emotions that are specially (although not unbreakably) connected to awareness of how the self appears to others. The problem starts early: one-year-olds have a startling capacity for self-consciousness; their grasp of what it is to lose face or feel foolish is striking for seeming, but not ...”

“... it into poems. Bloom’s Freudian model of literary relationships has often been criticised as self-parodically male. The boys in the canon scrap in the sandpit. One steals a spade from another, bends it a bit to make it his own, and then donks his daddy on the head with it. He becomes the biggest boy in the pit.There is a tiny bit of truth in that ...”

“... Whether in person or in print, self-consciousness is unsettling. Self-conscious writers, like self-conscious speakers, can’t help betraying that they’re more concerned with their interest in a subject, and the manner which conveys that interest, than in the subject itself ...”

“... creative life, they are none the less eager to shine their light on their own work. At its best, self-consciousness is forgotten and the act of self-explanation becomes a part of the self-vindication of the work and even of the creative process in general. The interview is a medium ...”

“... grand project stands apart because his narrator is not concerned with the social but with the self. He does not observe the world, or measure himself in relation to others, or talk about last things. Instead, he grandly and humourlessly seeks to find a language to match his feelings and his sensations, to describe in great detail what it is to be ...”

“... much admired and praised – but not by Claude Rawson, who calls it variously ‘pompous’, ‘self-serving’, ‘overrated’, ‘unctuously self-exalting’, ‘self-promoting’, ‘pontifical’ and ‘patronising’ Item: in a chapter on Richardson (wittily called ...”

“... One might think from the intensity of the reaction that the Agreement denied a Unionist right to self-determination throughout Northern Ireland in just the same way as Unionists deny it to Nationalists in South Down, South Armagh, Fermanagh, Tyrone and part of (London)derry. All the Agreement says, however, is that the Dublin Government has the right to have ...”

“... doubt helps explain the republication of the Hegel book – unchanged, except for an astringently self-critical new preface – but does not guarantee that it will be read. Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in 20th-Century France is often overlooked in accounts of Butler’s career, especially polemical ones. It is the one book left unmentioned, for ...”

“... The Romantic era produced in abundance both self-dramatisers and self-esteemers. Despite their obvious relation, they are, and remain, two distinct species. In our own literature Byron is the prototype of the first, Wordsworth of the second. The great Goethe was, in his time, king and emperor of both, and highly revered for it ...”

“... place. Per Bak, a physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, thinks he has the answer: self-organised criticality. Bak applies this idea to a stunning range of disciplines, from geology, economics, biology and neurology to the science of traffic jams. The flagship example of self-organised ...”

“... vary greatly in intention, from those which exist primarily to identify tags or phrases to the self-styled treasuries or (if one must) chrestomathies, built more for browsing and brushing up on Nietzsche. The most discriminating of these collections, a cynic might say, are those which exclude the mots of the compiler himself. The tendency to line oneself ...”

“... its wealth; so he lavishes scruples on his readers. Heaney’s poetry is loaded with anxiety and self-tormented power. At times this is truly powerful, and at other times merely self-tormented. But this is nevertheless the grimace of a major poet.In much of his work, both in verse and prose, Heaney has struggled for a ...”