“... 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 ...”

“... these two rather different positions was not however entirely his fault: for Hamilton’s self-set task was to synthesise Kant’s idealism with the realism of Reid and Stewart. Mill’s intellectual quarrel with Hamilton is best illustrated by their divergent attitudes on two central topics. The first of these concerns our grounds for believing in an ...”

“... accounts by Degas and Redon which show how the personality Delacroix projected – isolated, self-absorbed – was read by a younger generation of painters. Degas remembered seeing him, walking with his collar turned up and a scarf around his neck, ‘rapidly crossing the street, and stepping up on the other pavement, still going fast’. The memory ...”

“... is a version of the sublime superego. There is that within any political power which is excessive, self-undoing, and so a threat to its untrammelled sovereignty. Daydreams of homecoming, nightmares of rootlessness, fetishism of the land: these are psychic scenarios which, in the Middle East and elsewhere, break loose from the privacy of the bedroom to issue in ...”

“... at getting away with it. He was a wealthy and successful New Yorker; his crimes were acts of self-regard. Cooper’s men of violence are close to anonymous; they are not proud of, nor even stirred by, their actions. They live in barely-described suburbs, and rarely eat or leave or have a long conversation. They just pursue their obsession, which is ...”

“... of this ‘Arab’ trade in graphic detail. They weren’t insincere, but they weren’t devoid of self-interest either. Then, as today, the humanitarian campaigns to ‘save Africa’ became entwined with strategic political interests and big egos. As Jeal shows, even the ‘saintly’ Livingstone was vulnerable to the attractions of stardom, despite ...”

“... sense, which implies a distinct occupational category, and the subjective sense, which is merely self-ascribed or idiosyncratic. He finds it more useful to work with what he calls the ‘cultural sense’, which recognises that the intellectual performs a role before a certain sector of the public, using media that reach audiences different from and larger ...”

“... a great portrait-painter by a not-bad apprentice artist. The book is not so much a portrait of a self as of a not-self, a character quite flat, and thin, and white, not even as rounded and remarkable as Powell’s amiable self-burlesque in his Journals, in which he ...”

“... bleakness, is it coolness, is it harshness? At a time when apparently everything is magnified by self-pity and the flinching or clamorous anticipation of pain, Li is entirely without. Things happen to her characters before they are ready, not after. The blade cuts into the flesh before there is the least outcry, and even then it will probably be bitten ...”