“... 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 ...”

“... syntax remind one of Larkin and even Andrew Motion. A more surprising influence is Eliot: ‘My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark’ has the sort of rhythmical hysteria and claustrophobic shadowiness that Hamilton has made his own; and a line from ‘La Figlia Che Piange’ – ‘Her hair over her arms and her arms full of ...”

“... Christina the poetess lived as an ascetic, her religious devotion powerless to assuage the self-loathing which seems to have dominated so much of her adult life. (According to more than one account, she died raving at her own perdition.) ‘Why, one wonders,’ as Jan Marsh puts it, ‘did the four siblings have such difficulties when their ...”

“... syndrome (‘spectral pall’) that can readily be diagnosed in many other cases. And Healey? Self-evidently a man of catholic literary tastes, formed and sustained by a lifetime of interstitial reading amid busy days and nights, he was formidably equipped to rise to the challenge of authorship. His grand strategy was brilliantly simple: to write his own ...”

“... both he and his nation were pliant to circumstance. Diaries tend to be written either by comically self-important Mr Toads or by Pooters – those who need to record their daily successes and triumphs over their rivals in order to be sure that they have actually got to where they hope they have got to. Pepys has traces of both Toad and Pooter, but he also ...”

“... time, recognise a value of truth which is not just that – for instance, when we recognise that self-deceit is in itself not the best of states. Again, our ideas of truthfulness are under a great deal of strain at present. On the one hand, we tend to be pervasively suspicious, anxious not to be fooled, eager to see through appearances to the real motives ...”

“... who they are and how they are to live? Nussbaum is in effect saying to such feminists that the self-silencing brought on by their relativistic worries is no more justified than the silence imposed on feminist voices by societal misogyny or pig-headed colleagues. Having found our voices, we should not muffle or mute them in the name of an ...”

“... pain and revolt us, but for that very reason, it does not allure or corrupt.’ It was partly such self-justifications that provoked James Thomson’s judgment on Bulwer-Lytton in 1874: ‘he was one of the most thorough and hollow humbugs of the age; false and flashy in everything; with pinchbeck poetry, pinchbeck learning, pinchbeck sentiment; stealing ...”

“... feminist criticism has degenerated since its harmonious beginnings in the mid-1970s, becoming a self-enclosed hive of accusations and counter-accusations. I believe her. It sounds awful. Why keep going to those conferences, listening to those papers that attack or ignore you? Why cling to the fantasy of a lost concord? It is hard for the fight against ...”

“... Kent State massacre; anti-war protesters battled construction workers in the streets of New York; self-proclaimed political prisoners attempted bloody escapes; middle-class students planted bombs and robbed banks. In August that year, Richard Nixon took a break from a four-day conference on crime control to address reporters. His subject was the spell that ...”

“... the Vietnam War, In Pharaoh’s Army: ‘Isn’t there, in the very act of confession, an obscene self-congratulation for the virtue required to see your mistake and own up to it?’ Jonathan Franzen’s memoir, The Discomfort Zone, is an object lesson in the management of such obscenity. The book begins with a loss. After lengthy treatment for colon ...”

“... looted vehicles, killed and humiliated people. They wanted to kill us. That was when we formed the self-defence forces.’ He had limited fighting experience. He had worked for the UN and African Union peacekeeping mission to Darfur before it was wound up during the transition and had then turned to smuggling cars from Libya to Darfur. Since the desert was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”