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“... good man. By ‘good’, Canetti makes it clear, he means untainted by any trace of levity, self-interest or obeisance to fashion. Broch finally remembers Dr Sonne and suggests how the other can meet him. Canetti does so and is captivated. Henceforth he meets this hero of heroes for two hours every day in the Café Museum. They talk and talk – or ...”

“... Do we have ‘friends’, or do we just know various people? There is something a bit sticky and self-conscious about the idea of friendship. Anyone can be in love and proud of it, but to have a ‘friend’ – no, it really won’t do. ‘I’m your friend,’ said Myfanwy to John as they crouched in the ‘dark and furry cupboard while the rest played hide-and-seek ...”

“... taken on lightness, so humour is comedy that has lost its bodily weight ... It casts doubt on the self, on the world, and on the whole network of relationships that are at stake.’ In Tuten’s novel, doubt is cast both on the self and on the world from the minute Tintin and his companions, Snowy and Captain Haddock, leave ...”

“... of Heather’s true calibre and the finally devastating effect of that on her own sense of self provides the novel’s momentum. The story develops into a kind of contest between them. Perhaps the most fundamental question in Anita Brookner’s work is, how is a woman to live? Family and Friends (1985) gave the problem a historical dimension; A Friend ...”

“... unusual for him. He couldn’t move, he told me, without getting out of breath, but he was his old self: by which I mean that he had reverted to that youthful self which he preserved intact into middle age – something caught so well in Tony Quinton’s sweet and genial tribute (Spectator, 8 July). ‘My doctor has given me ...”

“... visible distillation, brandy-like, of the anima vagula blandula, the tenuous and transparent daily self that produced it. Another kind of good writing does not establish itself as involuntary personality, but as something the writer is just very, very good at doing. Such a dispossessed fluency seems available to everyone with a flair for catching a fashion. I ...”

“... of the first time Cézanne masturbated. (Or Nadar. Or Duchamp. Or Arbus.) Not yet sexually self-aware, Mapplethorpe visited Greenwich Village ‘to stare at homosexuals’ and ‘to bask in their malevolent aura’. Transplanted to New York’s nervous, ambiguous Chelsea, he quickly realised that sex would become his great subject. He made sculptures ...”

“... market for these books cannot be overestimated: in fact, as you would expect from this compulsive self-analyst, he has already discussed it himself. His concept of the ‘open’ and the ‘closed’ text, articulated most clearly in The Role of the Reader (1979), is really a way of re-stating, in slightly less contentious terms, the old distinction between ...”

“... are to a large extent guesswork – apart from anything else, levels of alcohol consumption are self-reporting, so accurate figures for usage are hard to come by, especially among heavy drinkers with fucked-up health. In any case, doctors don’t believe what patients tell them about their boozing habits. The spiky British wine writer Andrew Barr told his ...”

“... Enlightenment,’ she writes, summarising her psychoanalytic conclusions, ‘was above all a self-recognition and a self-assertion on the part of the Ego’; it was a series of revolutionary acts that led to ‘the emancipation of pleasure’. This message sounds a most reassuring note to me: it sustains the argument I ...”

“... Marxism. They witnessed the rise to power of National Socialism. The despotic insanities, the self-destruction, the spiralling descent into barbarism which they brought to Russia and to Europe constitute the gravest crisis in modern history, perhaps in Western history as a whole. Though the fact has at times escaped English notice, the deaths by civil ...”

“... wide-ranging series of essays, now issued in paperback, deals with normal man. The Multiple Self considers the question of whether the normal self is a unity, or whether it should be regarded, in some non-metaphorical sense, as divided. Just as deep oil wells were discovered by the smear of oil that found its way to ...”

“... the academy is hardly ever more than a backdrop for her, Moore nonetheless captures the weird, self-involved aimlessness of academic life, the curious way in which, like a psychoanalysis, it becomes both the method and the object of observation. In the story ‘Community Life’, a university librarian called Olena describes how she dropped out of graduate ...”

“... death of God: ‘there is,’ Scruton mystically claims, ‘a making whole, a rejoining of the self to its rightful congregation that come through art and literature.’ He believes that, like hunting, reading Jane Austen is a binding social ritual. TV adaptations don’t count. ‘The property of an educated élite’, high art was barely held onto by the ...”

“... probably a happy marriage, it was undoubtedly an advantageous one. It set a pattern of enlightened self-interest that recurred throughout Hogarth’s life. In almost all his activities – his campaign for a copyright law to protect engravers, his generosity to the Foundling Hospital, the offer to St Bartholomew’s to paint the great murals there gratis ...”