“... 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 ...”

“... highway and railway line, cubes of light with boys in Canadiens jerseys, circling in the blissful self-absorption of being masters of their bodies, lost in the trance of the hard bright air and the sound of the blades on the ice. I might have stayed in Canada if I had been a good hockey player. I would have belonged. But the sense of exclusion from the ...”

“... wife has been loyal to the last. But unfair because he could not have embarked on five years of self-indulgence and self-destruction, ending in charges of drug trafficking, if he had not been bankrolled by the British Government and in particular by the Labour Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Roy Mason. Mason put ...”

“... some spontaneous emotional and intellectual reaction that has been only partly processed by self-conscious rationalisation. As Gran himself comments, with the passage of time ‘the memory of the hardship fades to leave the adventure bright and clear.’ A good diary should offer more than just ‘the adventure bright and clear’. One reason for ...”

“... the works. Insofar as it is biographical, it easily refutes the charge that Peacock was a cold and self-indulgent eccentric. Elusive and strange the handsome lover of women may have been in his meditations on ‘free love’, he was passionate, too, in his family affections. His parents lived apart, and, perhaps, in such a man the affections would be more ...”

“... wider following, Lacan is the man who dismantled the Ego, the traditional point of stability and self-control in the Freudian trinity of Ego, Superego and Id. In Lacan’s version of Freud, the Ego dissolves: it has, literally, no place in the topological model of the psyche. It is a convenient and therefore a contestable fiction, since the question ...”

“... was at its closest, though he was later to break it off, in a reaction of independence which was self-protective and entirely necessary. One of the many interesting facts in Hayman’s detailed and scholarly biography is that Nietzsche was present at the Wagner house on the famous occasion on Christmas Day 1870 when Richter and 15 musicians played on the ...”

“... devoted, commendably enough, to an inquiry into the problems of identity, or selfhood. The word ‘self’ turns up again and again. In ‘Purification’, from A Round of Applause (1962), he addresses an unspecified second person with the words: Wearing yourself as though it were The lightest of all garments, moving As though all answers were a mode of ...”

“... of the state. The positive side of the Liberal ideal, which Bradley brings out well, was to invoke self-help and the voluntary principle as the true means of promoting progress. This in turn meant leaving a great deal to individual responsibility and judgment, for good or ill. Newman put the philosophical objection here with some precision: ‘Liberalism is ...”

“... and Hitler’s Christian names: whichever of its dimensions you scrutinise, ‘this astounding self-portrait’ (we thought it was supposed to be ‘not … about muself’?) is shoddy at is most interesting, and journalese at its frequent emptiest. Stripped of the last vestige of verbal dignity and talking American slang,* Shostakovich simply makes an ...”