“... be a myriad modes of euphoria on display, while glumness would be unmasked as brittle, modish and self-indulgent. The only problem is that no publisher would touch it. Another Hegelian aesthetic which most modernism ditched was the kind of art in which personal relationships reflect deeper social forces. As the public sphere came to seem icily remote from ...”

“... to itself, he insisted, must produce the best of all possible worlds, since a capitalist pursuing self-interest makes life better for everyone. ‘The study of his own advantage naturally, or rather necessarily, leads him to prefer that employment which is most advantageous to society.’ He is ‘led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part ...”

“... distancing device which allowed him to dip back into Dublin was style. The novel’s elaborately self-conscious language helps to fend off the place at the same time as it brings it closer. Joyce immerses himself in his home town, but only as it is mediated by his all-sovereign art. We are never allowed to forget that this is a city made of words. Samuel ...”

“... lightning of divinity flickering around his locked, lobster-like claws seeks patiently to undo his self-defences. Thomas Mann’s Adrian Leverkühn, the damned hero of Doctor Faustus, chooses to study theology at university, determined to take the measure of the opposition. Like the saints, the wicked constitute a spiritual aristocracy, a privileged elite as ...”

“... it is in any sense one’s own. Hartman’s story is the story of someone who is almost uncannily self-reliant, who is strengthened by his own intellectual affinities, and not by the making of enemies; someone who is endlessly curious and confounded by what he finds himself depending on. What Hartman terms ‘the call of literature’ can sustain ‘both a ...”

“... policy belongs to a world of morality and high-mindedness: it is determined by realpolitik, self-interest and imperial ambition. Indeed, he declares that all these various adventures – Bosnia and Kosovo as much as Afghanistan – are part of America’s imperial project. He accepts that Bosnia remains in a mess, with no end in sight; he admits that ...”

“... is, or was (maybe it has pretty much gone out in our post-Wolfenden days), an acting-out of self-hatred or desperate self-mockery. The thought occurred to me recently on seeing a production of Vanbrugh’s The Relapse at the National Theatre. The actor playing Lord Foppington, the madly vain ‘man of fashion’, was ...”

“... signal. Michael hits the booze a little harder and begins to regret his contempt for the ‘self-conscious libertines’ of his vitalist canon: ‘If what he thought and said mattered, he would have to re-examine everything now.’ Enter Lara Purcell, a glamorous, cosmopolitan political scientist. Lara is from the Windward Islands, exotic and ...”

“... Miller was, in fact, like so many in those years, a sort-of-Marxist committed primarily to self-discovery and the ousting of Fascism, and the plays, where they are at their best, survive as artworks more for the self-discovery than the anti-Fascism. Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge and After ...”

“... it isn’t hard to guess where he is heading: Darwin’s ‘noxious ideas’ about ruthless self-interest had, we are told, ‘a direct and disastrous influence … on Hitler’ and on ‘the social programmes of the Third Reich, culminating in the Holocaust’. You do not have to be a dyed-in-the-wool Darwinist to think that natural selection will ...”

“... all of that. But nothing else – nothing hard or kernel-like.’ Instead of a stable narratable self, the best Bascombe can manage is a sort of default one, adopted to reassure others. Given his disjunctions, reassurance isn’t easily provided. He’s earnest but doesn’t take himself seriously; hard-working but prone to ...”

“... be true enough: Murphy, de Acosta and Garland were all formidable women, largely unacquainted with self-pity. But not only is Cohen being a bit perverse – the salvage operation here is grand and thrilling – she sounds a tiny bit wishful too. Her overriding purpose, she writes, is to convince the reader that her neglected heroines deserve to be recognised ...”

“... of an audience with little grounding in classical literature. It can sometimes seem a little too self-consciously pitched at a student market (it’s a surprise to find Burrow declaring that ‘Shakespeare was a sceptical kind of guy, and Montaigne was a sceptical kind of guy’), and occasionally the compression necessary for a volume of this sort can make ...”