“... the church he suffers agonies because he’s too prim to bathe naked with the other men. He’s self-absorbed and selfless at the same time, accident-prone, masochistic: a kind of holy fool. But just as he grates intolerably on our nerves, nothing but an ‘Odd Bod’, as his fellow students claim, ‘a queer bird, a stork, a mantis, a gawk’, we glimpse ...”

“... chair, perch himself on a stool, and shave. This was one of Sunday’s simple-minded pleasures and self-indulgences: to shave at what time one pleased, and as long as one pleased, with the children nearby, watching, convincing one that a morning stubble was an amazing thing, and that the shaving instruments were holy tools, and that the act of sprinkling water ...”

“... explanation is that, in a long vigil, she came to think that an acceptance would amount to a self-interested interference in other people’s lives, the act of just such an ‘imaginist’ as Emma Woodhouse would afterwards become. Given that her putative victims all seem to have approved of the projected marriage, I am more convinced by Lord David ...”

“... the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body’. Jefferson did not exhibit the same self-knowledge and when he complained to Franklin during the course of the debate over the Declaration of Independence about the ‘degradations’ and ‘mutilations’ of his draft, Franklin was reminded of an incident from which, he said, ‘I took my ...”

“... turned into a voodoo carnival. Similar things are not unknown in Ireland, where Terry Eagleton’s self-consciously carnivalesque first novel is set. Saints and Scholars begins with a drably journalistic reconstruction of the execution of James Connolly at Kilmainham gaol in 1916. The opening pages are clumsily written – Connolly’s green overalls ‘stand ...”

“... in Western European countries. And I’m only talking about Kultur here, not mass murder. The self-appointed members of the master race made themselves at home by turning Polish palaces into beer halls – often after stuffing their pockets with treasure. Governor-General Hans Frank toured the ruins of the Royal Palace in Warsaw and casually tore silver ...”

“... anxiety not to give offence developed early. In his autobiography Without Stopping (1972) – a self-portrait so unrevealing that William Burroughs renamed it Without Telling – Bowles describes some of the ruses and deceits he evolved so as to avoid the wrath of his near-psychotic father, Claude Bowles, whose methods of child-rearing seem to have derived ...”

“... no colour lines in music’; it expressed doubts about integrated big bands, and did not exclude a self-righteous belief in American superiority, and hostility to ‘un-American ideals’, pursued by ‘groups of unassimilated peoples here ... breeding hates among themselves and disrespect for American institutions’ – i.e. Nazis and ...”

“... we are surely bound to find the Epicureans too rationalistic, the Sceptics too procedurally self-obsessed, the Stoics (at least in their Roman incarnation) too unyieldingly pompous for us to take entirely seriously, not just their therapies, but the idea of them as philosophical therapists. Nussbaum indeed alleviates the formal implications of their use ...”

“... he did so both discreetly and discretely, his first-person je left teasingly intermediate between self-reference and a merely grammatical subjectivity, so that we have only intuition to go on in deciding how many autobiographemes there might be in that book. Given how extraordinarily well it sold – 80,000 copies in the first year is the figure Calvet gives ...”

“... with tractors and hammers and sickles. Aids has encouraged makers in genres which privilege wilful self-absorption to do something similar. Sometimes this works, but a lot of the art in Don’t Leave Me This Way fails. Describe these pieces, look to the descriptions for meanings, and pretty often you get messages of painful banality: Gay Beauty Myth (collage ...”

“... court’. Why Pepys risked being stood in the pillory, or having his nose slit, by keeping such a self-incriminating archive is hard to fathom, and it inevitably raises the question of why he needed to keep a diary in the first place. Was it an exercise in sheer vanity? Was it the compulsion of a born record-keeper? Was it a bid for posthumous fame? Was it ...”

“... one might think to occultism and theosophy – Eastern religion, Vedanta, the Tarot pack, mystical self-abasement. As Butler notes, the early Modernism which excited London between 1910 and 1915 made an accommodation with ‘classicising and tradition-conscious’ English culture after the war. Only Woolf produced novels which went beyond her early ...”

“... might wonder ‘whether, notwithstanding impassioned aims, paeans of progress, endless pageants of self-illusions’, humanity’s ‘capacity of degeneration did not equal, and might some day exceed, its capacity of development’. The telling of this melancholy story is not helped by the book’s joint authorship: some relevant facts are rehearsed several ...”

“... Wokulski, an intelligent and sensitive man, is aware of his predicament and given to tortured self-analysis. Nor does he lack colleagues and friends to tell him what to do. Will he ever act on his realisation that he would have had no difficulty in rejecting his beloved if he had known her better? Though it centres on a single obsessive relationship, this ...”