“... never have been planned on a drawing board by the human brain. Its transformations, spontaneous, self-generated, could not have been conceived.’ This is not, the narrator insists, ‘evidence to be claimed by religious or other creational mysticism’, but is greater than any collective mind or faith. Perhaps, ‘whatever civilisation does to destroy ...”

“... house in Stratford, fussing with his lawyers over the disposition of an ample estate, the private self revealed in the Sonnets safely back in the closet. If we think of the end of Marlowe’s career we see a dangerously, glamorously mixed-up 29-year-old who has fallen among bad company, a prodigal genius who has lived fast and is to die young, and whose last ...”

“... a sapphic swive-hound for the ages like Patricia Highsmith. God, was she depraved. Prouder of her self-styled ‘erections’ than a Proud Boy. Yes, rilly. (‘I’m not a woman,’ she was often heard to say.) But wouldn’t even Pat have found the slender yet muscular barbarian, caped in pelts, inky blue ‘sleeves’ covering both his arms, the tiniest bit ...”

“... relatively unproven, but the wrong gender; she was pushed right up against the ‘dream of womanly self-effacement’ that she diagnosed in her elders:From the 1920s into the 1940s, Greene and several of his talented male contemporaries were working, in English fiction, related veins of anxiety and intelligence, anger and danger, sex and sensibility, and ...”

“... denounces him.Indeed, the whole of his oeuvre has been read as an attempt to bolster his self-confidence. His critics declare that he wanted to be sure that he really was in with the upper classes and not, like Paul Pennyfeather at the end of Decline and Fall, once more drinking cocoa with Stubbs and listening to a paper on the Polish ...”

“... which each country is culturally organised and politically structured. In Germany, where no major self-identified gay writer has emerged in the twenty years since the death of Hubert Fichte, gay fiction is considered to be little better than a joke, usually a dirty one; there may or may not be a more pronounced homophobia in Germany than in other European ...”

“... Bachelor, the other most successful examples of what Salman Rushdie has called the ‘unashamed self-display of the talentless’. On US cable, moreover, there is Reality Central to look forward to, a ‘new 24/7 cable television network devoted solely to the reality television programming genre and its shows, news, stars and fans’, which has been set up ...”

“... of October. That it took Tartt ten years to write The Little Friend isn’t necessarily a sign of self-reflexive anxiety of influence: she spent nearly a decade writing The Secret History, too. Zadie Smith works faster: it’s less than three years since White Teeth first grinned from the windows of Waterstone’s. And to judge from the beginning of The ...”

“... room at the National Portrait Gallery, you forget that this Blitz Club kid was once the prince of self-malleability. In the paintings, everything about him is pulled down by the weight of his own flesh. David Hockney doesn’t look so much like himself as like Freud’s style looking like itself: he is jowlier, his hair is more sparse, his eyes are ...”

“... in 1938 that acts preparatory to coitus all served in different ways to duplicate the narcissistic self. The syllabus of kissing, stroking, biting and the rest facilitates the loss of boundaries between the different partners and divests the woman of her terror. Now your bliss- equipment is discarded, and our clothes are heaped in different tumuli, my male ...”

“... Language the contract Between self and nothing When bending to earth it Exchanges the sky for words Out walking on that Uncertain estuary border Where we found the beached conger – It was starting to swell And gull-flight lifting over Ocean pectoral surge – I walked there a neighbour To that small ancient hea ...”

“... artifices of narrative, they would appear to be the ideal candidates for the difficult task of the self-description of a life. Yet strangely it is not they but philosophers who have excelled at the genre – indeed all but invented it. In principle, autobiography is the most intimately particular of all forms of writing, philosophy the most abstract and ...”

“... important is being treated with insufficient seriousness; because of the excessive, hedonistic self-regard of Wilde’s ‘histrionic vanity’, some fundamental experience is alluded to without the appropriate gravity. It is what Eliot calls ‘the most terrible experiences’, ‘the atmosphere of unknown terror and mystery in which our life is ...”

“... philosophy wasn’t primarily something you learned, but something you practised, with a view to self-transformation. So it was indispensable in critically evaluating a philosopher to critically evaluate their way of life, for that life was the definitive expression of their philosophy, and their writings were primarily a means of achieving that essential ...”

“... Dickens as intimately as the man knew himself; better, perhaps, since Dickens was not great on self-knowledge. There are no lost keys, no closed doors. Ackroyd, for instance, can read the expression on the dead Dickens face on the narrow green sofa. The expression is childlike: ‘It was the look he recorded in William Dorrit’s face in death; it was the ...”