“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... us take comfort from the thought that, though individually we are required to be competitive and self-regarding, nevertheless somehow and somewhere our collective organic self is being caring and altruistic on our behalf. Such an institution clearly deserves study in its own right, as a complex of the things that history ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the Mind, the ethologist Robert Hinde, writes that ‘chimpanzees have a conception of the self and can dissemble and deceive others,’ and that there is strong evidence that ‘dogs have pleasant and unpleasant dreams.’ Someone must have forgotten to warn Hinde that such discourse is forbidden. Masson/McCarthy complain of the restricted vocabulary ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”