“... them did something that was a genuine contribution to anthropology, but the rest was docudrama and self-promotion. The discipline seems particularly vulnerable to this form of exhibitionist exuberance, and the public’s greed for the sensational and the exotic fuels it. The mandate of anthropology is so broad that it easily bursts the bounds of strict ...”

“... baby – up the wall And from a bottle on the topmost shelf Marked Danger, Do Not Touch, or Self, Swallow, and in the slow paralysis And death that follow scrawl In blood, vomit or piss: ‘God damn you all, God bless you too – but don’t drink ...”

“... at St Columb’s. Hopkins’s ‘whole theology of suffering’, his determined enunciations of self-denial, also echoed Heaney’s ‘mother’s situation … doomed to biology, a regime without birth control, nothing but parturition and potato-peeling’, ‘toiling on in the faith that a reward was … in heaven’.The religious sensibility that led ...”

“... gun to his head but been unable to pull the trigger, thereby generating further grounds for the self-loathing which had driven him to his desperate act. Desperate and sinful: suicide, even attempted suicide, perhaps even the stagey simulation of possible suicide, is a sin against the Holy Ghost, and although Greene, who converted to Catholicism when he was ...”

“... lady he cherished on Earth.Throughout his life, Dante engaged in an audacious project of self-exegesis and self-correction. The Vita Nuova anthologises his earlier lyrics and frames them in a prose narrative that supplies formal criticism as well as autobiographical context. It also reveals Dante’s deep ...”

“... a political celebrity. He discussed the ‘Negro Question’ – the question of Black people’s self-determination – with the ‘big Bolsheviks’, Zinoviev, Bukharin and Trotsky, and travelled the country educating the Soviets about Black people in America. (His book Negry v Amerike, published in the Soviet Union in 1923 but not in the West until ...”

“... way necessary to his agitated soul. Years later Balzac would produce a telling portrait of the self-torturing romantic loves of George Sand, Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult in the (relatively little-read) novel, Béatrix. It’s hard to know who could have done justice to the upper-class intellectual-bohemian melodrama played out in and around Coppet ...”

“... are at present under heavy philosophical battering, including the very idea of a stable inner ‘self’ and of a universally knowable ‘human nature’, and they deconstruct quite nicely under the Derridean wrecking ball. The Enlightenment was undoubtedly a mode of control, with its own orthodoxies. What needs to be emphasised at the moment, however, is ...”

“... unremarked by Anglo-American opponents who assume that no Frenchman has ever paid attention to a self-respecting ‘logical’ argument.) The operative concept is that which distinguishes ‘proper’ from ‘common’ names, the former marked out by the fact that they refer directly to some unique individual (person, object or event). With common names, on ...”

“... is a fact of the matter, not the whole truth of it. Mailer here has better things to do with his self than to attend to it or upon it. You could call the book a feat of self-abnegation if the word ‘feat’ didn’t suggest a bravura. Gilmore, who had no self-control once he had decided ...”

“... goes, the first volume of her autobiography, would be hard to better as a portrait of her young self or of any other bright young thing in that generation. As a writer she had energy, verbal invention, natural comic timing and a fastidious ear which would have ruled out the possibility of her ever using, as Mr Ziegler does, such a cloddish term as ...”

“... Berryman and Lowell were the great contemporary narrators, compulsive tellers of stories about the self, and their style was sharply and wholly comprehensive, perfectly expressing what Berryman’s mentor R.P. Blackmur called ‘the matter in hand’, as well as ‘adding to the stock of available reality’. Such poetry invented the ...”

“... theatre built on a similar brutalist scale to the National in London but with less of its self-effacing eagerness to fit in. Or rather I saw Hamlet not in the Ivan Franko Music and Drama Theatre but under it. The theatre’s ambitious artistic director, Rostislav Derzhypilsky, had discovered that beneath the public areas of the building there was a ...”

“... the whole text thus reduced cries out to be allowed to expand, to grow up, to have its whole self back again.’ His strongest objection, however, is to Theory’s rancorous contempt for humanism and the human subject. Cunningham is well-read and committed, and he lands some solid punches, but it’s impossible to stick with him for long because he ...”

“... Rick Moody’s The Black Veil is the latest voyage to the bottom of the sink, a journey of self-discovery jinxed by dense fog and treacherous syntax. Moody is best known for his novels, Garden State (which is being released for the first time in the UK to piggyback on the publication of this book),* Purple America and The Ice Storm, and his short-story ...”