“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... out. God the reader, if you like, was taken as read. Borgesian highlightings put such issues on a self-conscious plane of fragmented intellection, and are the imaginative manifestation of a fall from grace, as the critical routines of modern ‘rhetorics of reading’ are its academic counterpart or epiphenomenon. Professor Nuttall is a richly humane reader ...”

“... personality evolved towards late-flowering celebrity. In one of Lees-Milne’s regular pessimistic self-assessments, amid laments about his loss of hair and declining libido at 40, he noted that despite it all his mental faculties, ‘never first-rate, are better than they have ever been’. ‘All my life,’ he adds, ‘I have been a slow developer.’ It is ...”

“... the billionaires take to calling themselves the Meliorists, Nader has apparently abandoned the self-defeating dogma that the worse things get, the better they get: he aims instead to chart incremental progress towards an alternative politics. The results are mixed. Despite its noble intentions, this 733-page book is a trial to read. The writing is by turns ...”

“... way that’s clever and distanced but also consciously intense, with giving voice to parts of the self that not everyone puts on display. There are other similarities: a provincial city – Naples, Newark – that functions as the centre of the universe; an emphasis on the struggle between anarchic self-expression and the ...”

“... politics and nature. Instead Huxley started to search for a more timeless and ‘disembodied’ self. The gap between Huxley and his garish new world seems to have made this transition possible. Huxley opens After Many a Summer, the first novel he wrote in California, with a description of the sprawling landscape of Beverly Hills, seen through the ...”

“... Ellender sees this baby list as an outpouring of hope on the page, or a ‘letter to a future self. We have to visualise a self that is well, happy, functioning, a self free from shame, a self performing its tasks efficiently and happily.’ The ...”

“... actions that would jeopardise national order and harmony. That claim of exceptionalism may seem self-satisfied and insular now, but it rested on an assumption that social peace was hard won and that human sinfulness, as Gladstone put it, was ‘the great fact in the world’.Parliament’s function was not just to block rash policies; it also had a ...”