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“... 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 ...”

“... late instance of the Continental sage. What was his wisdom? He was interested in knowledge, self-knowledge above all. He believed that most pretenders to knowledge were ‘deluded’, and was convinced that literature must be unique in the knowledge it afforded, or else in giving a master-clue to the delusion of every sort of knowledge including its ...”

“... little stringent’, to the writer himself she returned an answer in which genuine humility and self-abasement can barely be distinguished from an edgy and corrosive irony:   In the evenings, I confess, I do think, but I never trouble any one else with my thoughts. I carefully avoid any appearance of pre-occupation and eccentricity, which might lead ...”

“... Schwartz’s sense of his uniqueness had nothing in common with Lowell’s type of lordly self-belief, nor with the obsessive thirst for fame that motivated a poet like John Berryman. His literary career is often compared pityingly with their astute professionalism, as if, authentic poète maudit though he was, he never quite got the marketing ...”

“... If it has weaknesses, they are the product of its strength. It doesn’t always stop short of self-congratulation. One would have to feel very sure of the advantages of not-reading to dismiss as a ‘dull affair’ a magazine whose first issue included Lewis’s ‘Enemy of the Stars’ and whose second issue included Eliot’s ‘Preludes’. The ...”

“... at stake, British leaders and diplomats constantly insisted, was the right of the Falklanders to self-determination: if that right were to be prejudiced or removed, they said, it would cut across a basic provision of the Charter. All this was, of course, music to the ears of delegates representing small, vulnerable countries and, around the world, there are ...”