“... 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 ...”

“... ways of responding to this basic challenge. Behaviourists do what they can to render people’s self-understanding irrelevant: people are enlisted in studies ‘naively’ – that is, without being made aware of an experiment’s purpose – or take part in randomised control trials, in which they aren’t told whether or not they’ve been subject to an ...”

“... which had been founded in 1925. Not all of them saw themselves primarily as nationalist, or sought self-government for Wales, but, as King shows, they were densely interconnected.The new direction taken by Welsh campaigners was signalled in 1962 when Saunders Lewis, a founding member of Plaid Cymru, made a speech arguing that defending the Welsh language and ...”

“... 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 ...”