“... of his own literary strengths and weaknesses: I am certain that my mind is made if anything for self-contained imaginative work: critical activity of any kind is alien to me, alien and dissonant. The values structuring a critical work must be either impersonal or strange; the individuality of the critic, except emotionally, is to be nullified. Such ...”

“... to a dialectic between such ‘top-down’ principles and less well understood ‘bottom-up’ self-organisation emerging from the life of the city itself. That the workings of a system as complex as a city might be computable stretches the limits of credulity. There was nothing inevitable about the emergence of mudlarks by the river’s edge, or the ...”

“... mother’, and for his insistence that to exact compliance from the child is to create a False Self and inhibit the development of a True one. ‘Good-enough’ sounds placid and conciliatory, but it is a rather stern requirement. The child must have the conditions for ‘going-on-being’, and providing them is a delicate matter. The reward for success is ...”

“... throwback to another age. He explains how, in the late 19th century, history created its own self-serving niche by giving priority to the study of written documents over other traces of the past: primarily, the artefacts that became the stuff of prehistoric archaeology. This allowed historians to cling to a biblical orthodoxy about the deep past, and to ...”

“... in a new arrangement. Even as events seemed to tip the balance decisively in favour of national self-determination and a clean break – the Algerian war (from 1954), French withdrawal from Vietnam (1954), the independence of Morocco and Tunisia (1956), and Ghanaian independence (1957) – Senghor insisted that federation with France was essential for ...”

“... Platforms such as Twitter and Instagram have a similar effect on the presentation of the self, where the goal is to win plaudits for instantly impressive slogans and iconography. Chunks of ‘content’ – images, screengrabs of text, short snatches of video – circulate according to the number of thumbs up or thumbs down they receive.It is easy to ...”

“... The impression, as the orders arrive one after another, nearly a hundred of them so far, is of a self-amplifying state bent on overcoming the rule of law and testing the limits of authoritarian power. The effect on many has been to induce a sense of disorientation and terror; they wonder when, or whether, it will stop. Some wave the orders away, stressing ...”

“... and inferior person’. His secret hope was to be somebody else. The romance of Jung’s second self, his ‘Personality No 2’, would later dominate his remarkable memoirs, composed in old age with the assistance of Aniela Jaffé and at the instigation of Pantheon’s Kurt Wolff in one of the great publishing coups of the century. But neither Wolff nor ...”

“... against exploitation’, were ‘our allies in the struggle for a new society’ and must be given self-government at the earliest opportunity. Meanwhile, the war itself was ‘part of a world revolution of the common man, aimed at a new world of plenty and security’. Paul Addison, in Now the war is over, an excellent book derived from a good TV series, sees ...”

“... utterance, with the tiniest flicker of an eyelid or the slightest suggestion of a thought – a self-regard and obsession with the self usually only available to religious novitiates, madmen or very young children. Fame, with all of its fleshly temptations and attendant despairs, is an obvious incitement to ...”

“... past can be eradicated. What he can’t see is that this wishful thinking is precisely the kind of self-delusion that he takes to be characteristic of religion. That’s because it is a kind of religion. In his yearning for certainty, Christopher is merely replicating the intolerance and taste for indoctrination that he professes to despise among the ...”

“... look filled me with longing.The little girl in the picture became my secret sister, my other self, the pretty child I was – inside – in spite of my stout and clumsy outside and, at times, my ugly convict skull (the remedy for lice was shaving the head). Like many children, I was a changeling – not the right shape or temperament to belong to my ...”

“... that this fear was disguised, even from those who felt it, by publically-accredited rhetorics of self-reliance. Like the new historicists he admires, Leverenz has decided that self-fashioning is animated by forces outside the individual, that these are only superficially situated in specific historical events (Like the ...”

“... Hardwick’s great subject was women – their subjection, their stoicism, their self-reliance – but she wrote about them with a sort of fatalism, a fatalism that characterised her treatment of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, which she reviewed for Partisan Review when it appeared in English in 1953:Are women ‘the equal’ of ...”

“... people we would like to be, places we would like to go; on there being always an as yet unattained self. There is something we want, or think we need (hope, destination, not turning back, satisfaction), but because we cannot give up wanting it we have to redescribe the process of wanting, how we go about wanting it (if there is hope but not for us we have to ...”