“... is sometimes rather like Walt Whitman, democratic, containing multitudes, yet happy with solitary self-communion. In a pleasant essay called ‘A Sun-Bath – Nakedness’, Whitman remarks: ‘Here I realise the meaning of that old fellow who said he was seldom less alone than when alone. Never before did I get so close to Nature ...’ Who was the old ...”

“... that those who spoke with these voices were the betrayers of the age. Under their rhetoric lay a self-serving, self-perpetuating humbug. Just after the collapse of the Spanish Republic, at the close of the Civil War, Baldwin was invited down to the Political and Literary Society – Pol and Lit Soc – a place where we ...”

“... take charge of Gwendolen after the marine disaster, is a study of George Eliot’s own clear and self-committing sympathetic involvement and the nature of the duality to which this relates. There is a pervasive unreality that contrasts with the vivid livingness and actuality of the persons, scenes and episodes that George Eliot the creative genius makes ...”

“... of the black man’s intenser and more frequent orgasms and scornful of the puritan virtues of self-containment: ‘A stench of fear has come out of every pore of American life, and we suffer from a a collective failure of nerve.’ Ginsberg and Kerouac, too, tended to idolise blacks without really knowing many, and jazz was obviously the seminal influence ...”

“... who inherited $5000, began to reappraise his relationship with his father. Years later, in a self-published biography, the son would depict Forester as a manipulative fabulist, a distant, self-centred parent, a cold-hearted philanderer, and an insecure snob who was evasive about his origins as Cecil Smith from ...”

“... thing anyone was thinking about – apart from the author, naturally – was the fate of a book. Self-obsession of an ordinary sort, you might think, standard schlemiel come-uppance, but it gets royal treatment in the early part of the book, the part where a reader would normally be getting the measure of both author and narrator, which is easier when they ...”

“... no longer wish to be associated with Freud’s scientistic positivism; adepts of Kohut’s ‘self psychology’ blithely disregard the rules of analytic neutrality and abstinence in favour of an ‘empathic understanding’ of the patient; ‘narrativists’ no longer concern themselves with the ‘historical truth’ of what is said on the ...”

“... find then that not only the Arts, but everything else as well, were only dreams, that one’s self was nothing at all. It is quite another matter, however, to tackle the 2180 close-packed pages of the stupendous new comprehensive edition. Altogether, it falls in word-length somewhere between War and Peace and A la recherche du temps perdu, and as with ...”

“... intolerable.’ Politically, Swinburne saw himself as an apostle of liberalism, supporting ‘self-reliance, self-dependence, self-respect’ in the nation and the individual. His anti-theism, his justification of free speech and his belief in ‘art for art’s sake’ were ...”

“... and historical: geographical distance and colonial institutions engendered a distinct culture and self-consciousness, and, with it, a collective identity that laid the foundation for independent states. The late 19th century saw a repetition of this process in the white dominions of Canada and Australasia. Seen in this light, contemporary Taiwanese ...”

“... he wanted to hear – only increased the agitation; Arthur recalled ‘constant vigilance and self-repression, for fear Papa should be vexed. I never said what I thought, but what I thought he would like me to say.’ Fred regretted that ‘with him we were … decorous to the verge of woodenness. We had washed hands and neat hair and low voices … We ...”

“... novel. Rorty speaks of ‘unconscious selves’, which Freud never does, not needing the idea of a self or selves. Rorty does not speak of unrelenting and often violent conflict, and he refers to these putative unconscious selves as ‘the intellectual peers of our conscious selves’; as though far from being crude, or primitive, or instinctual – all words ...”

“... movement of a sentence, whose grammatical structure allows us to be both inside and outside a self-contained scene, a dramatic vignette with extension in time (‘and there were moments’) and space (the reflection in the mirror above the mantelpiece). Like a painting by Renoir or Manet, this scene invites limitless speculation about the novels that ...”

“... concern with theory in cultural commentary over the last twenty years? Why has methodological self-consciousness become a more pressing issue for literary critics than the traditional labour of elucidating literary works? Why are names like Barthes, Derrida, Benjamin, Foucault, Lukacs, Kristeva, Althusser, Lacan, Habermas, Bloom, Jameson, invested with ...”