“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”