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“... 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 ...”

“... of the exotic.The appeal of this form of dress is evident in portraits of the period, including self-portraits, such as Constance Mayer’s near monochrome painting of 1799. Mayer’s simple, high-waisted dress is set off by the sombre browns and greys of the interior. Her melancholic pose – one hand to her head as she gazes out towards the viewer ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... illusions under which the rest of mankind had blindly laboured for millennia. His unjustifiable self-assurance remains noteworthy because it proved so eminently transmissible, helping his philosophy attract ardent devotion, after 1890 or so, often from those who (in Adorno’s diagnosis) suffered from acute insecurity in decision-making and therefore ...”

“... a genius for observation that one doesn’t think of as Forsterian. The Bishop-like effacement of self in the presence of the thing described wasn’t natural to Forster, who prefers to stand in front of the picture with his pointer, half-obscuring the image with his amusing conceits on it. In Virginia Woolf’s words, ‘Mr Forster has been apt to pervade ...”

“... things, but contain them.’ And indeed, like her chosen idol, Cather made a fetish out of proud self-concealment. She never married, and despite the tremendous popular success of her work – she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours and had her picture on the cover of Time magazine in 1931 – she became reclusive and incommunicative in later years. She ...”

“... in what we can’t prevent ourselves from taking as an authorial discourse on history, with this self-justifying addition: ‘Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history.’ This is what Barnes himself, in this book, attempts. He fabulates this and that, stitches the fabulations together, and then he and we quite properly ...”

“... of something tiny which has powerfully affected the modern sensibility’. Conducing to ‘anxious self-awareness’ and ‘secret but overriding self-contempt’, it may even have contributed to Eliot’s creating of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. And ‘it would be depressing to estimate the amount of uniquely ...”

“... romances, but the hero’s very first speech, when he offers to take on the adventure, displays a self-possession which seems anything but adolescent. Indeed, he is less self-possessed at the end of the story than at the beginning. Most romances, as Dr Brewer rightly says, achieve a straightforward happy ending, but in Sir ...”

“... and eats most of her husband’s. Does it tell us something about Miss Bergman’s capacity for self-deception that she could neither leave Alan Burgess alone to write her biography nor sit down and write her own? Instead, they did it together, the actress and the author. Mr Burgess wrote The Small Woman, from which Miss Bergman’s 41st film, The Inn of ...”

“... is more ‘grown-up’ than she seems. These won’t last, Trevor mournfully insists, except by self-delusion, and he is never quite sure whether he thinks self-delusion is to be reverenced or deplored. In one story, for example, he has a newly-married couple quarrelling about the wife’s fondness for teddy-bears: she ...”

“... the Tam Lin poet, took the poet of ‘Jellon Grame’, and took my friend ‘Henri de Beaufort’, self-styled, who introduced me first to Jeanne Duval, leaving me no way back, while Baudelaire brayed from his deathbed – merde merde merde– and took Kirsten Flagstad who delivered up Kindertotenlieder, a gift outright, the radio on as I leant from my bedroom ...”

“... idea of living in an apartheid state. They will continue to resist Israel’s efforts to deny them self-determination. What is happening in Gaza is one dimension of that resistance. Another is Mahmoud Abbas’s plan to ask the UN General Assembly on 29 November to recognise Palestine as a non-member state. This move worries Israel’s leaders, because it could ...”