“... on, respectively, a word processor and a tape recorder needn’t be put down to Post-Modern self-consciousness. Novels naturally like to keep up with the technology on which they rely, but an appeal – however disingenuous – to external machinery and allegedly objective documentation is thoroughly classical. In skilled hands, such honesty about the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... standard is nothing less than perfection. In my experience, no species of performing artist is as self-critical as a dancer. I have gone backstage many times to congratulate a friend or acquaintance who is an actor or a pianist or a singer on his or her superlative performance; invariably my praise is received without much demurral, with evident pleasure (my ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”