“... about reading Erving Goffman in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Asylums, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and, I think, Stigma. They were required reading, part of the unofficial University of Pelican Books course on gathering information and ideas about the world. Month by month, titles came out by Laing and Esterson, Willmott and ...”

“... wipe their webbed flesh on our cheekbones, and we imagine ourselves winged. The Gypsy Moth’s self-enchanted drawl, its music in two notes of self, regarding self, throbs in the pilot. Satisfaction secretes over face, mind and brain, until he is aglow to do it, to bomb. The readers ...”

“... by the presence of an artist whose appearance is as distinct and as recognisable as his work. Self-portrait by Annibale Carracci (c.1575) Portrait of the Artist, an exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery (until 17 April), includes two images of Hockney. All the paintings, the prints and the sculpture are from the royal collection, which possesses an ...”

“... Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others by Hizbullah militants on 12 July. The right of self-defence identified by Blair and Bush is part of international law. Which makes two conclusions possible: either this area of international law is so elastic as to be inoperative; or it is being interpreted by Blair and Bush in an untenable way. There are two ...”

“... seen as the ultimate denial of that body unto death. In Kim Chernin’s large claim in The Hungry Self, modern woman’s obsession with eating and not-eating might even provide the royal road to the unconscious that dreams provided for Freud. Down there in Hades, did Persephone think obsessively about pomegranates while refusing to eat them; did she lovingly ...”

“... Pinter’s righteously angry protest verse, and any poetic therapist who mistakes ‘the jargon of self-help’ for the tough process of writing. By trying to make poetry ‘accessible’, the popularisers flatter the poet into thinking deep feelings are poetry, and flatter the audience into applauding only what they already know, reducing the art to ...”

“... Donald Davie has proposed that Eliot’s Quartets are in some sense a work of self-parody, with ‘The Dry Salvages’ in structure and style parodistic of the quartets that preceded it. This proposal took off from an idea of Hugh Kenner’s, and any theory with two such exceptionally able sponsors needs treating with respect ...”

“... which many people take away from John Ashbery’s poetry. The poem in which it appears, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, a meditation on Parmigianino’s strange Mannerist painting, suddenly made Ashbery’s name much less obscure than his work. The collection to which it lent its name won several prizes, including the Pulitzer, and was the ...”

“... central ideas about mothers and infants, about nurture and cure, about the authenticity of self, are evocative and powerful, but they are nonetheless heresy. Freud saw the triangle of Oedipal loves as a crucible for the development of personality; Winnicott focused on the earliest bonding of mother and child. Freud portrayed people driven by the ...”

“... democratic government, constitutionalism, the rule of law, a minimal state, property rights, self-regulating markets and the empowerment of the autonomous rational individual. Liberal ideas in the West had emerged in a variety of political and economic settings, in both Europe and North America. They originated in the Reformation’s stress on individual ...”

“... discharged a pistol in his direction, and a moment of prudent cowardice which greatly dented his self-esteem as a soldier – may well be related to it; the same is true of some unconscious currents in his emotional life, which he presents but makes little attempt to analyse. A year or two after his arrival in Palestine, Segre falls passionately in love with ...”

“... as a subversive science. For Lacan, the crux of Freud’s view is that there is no centred, stable self. People are constructed by language and society. But ego psychology has pointed itself in the other direction. Its notion of an autonomous ego supports the ‘illusion’ of the Cartesian subject, the ego as a rational and intentional agent. The ...”

“... of their intellectual interests, so completely off the wall. But Yeats was one of the last great self-fashioners, and it is never quite possible to know how far he credited his own scrupulously cultivated absurdities, or even what ‘credited’ there would actually mean. On the one hand, there was the Celtic visionary who when he lived in Oxford couldn’t ...”

“... books of selected pieces. He also worked as a part-time TV performer, conducting interviews, doing self-scripted monologues, taking part in round-table discussions and generally making his presence felt on screen. In 1982, he got his own programme, Clive James on Television, and became a mass-market celebrity. Clip show presenter, chat-show host, star of a ...”

“... stalker of regrets, was born to tell her. In doing so, she draws on the deep reservoirs of self-pity and victimology that Oprah has been wallowing in for 25 years. The two of them were made for each other, with their love of confession and ‘personal revelations’. Each, in her own lucrative way, has coarsened the public’s understanding of real ...”