“... even a public deceitfulness, but rather that the high-minded propounders of liberal ideals, the self-satisfied advocates of ‘procrustean virtue’, as he occasionally puts it, are self-deceived. But, once more, if that implies, as it surely must, that they are blinded to the reality of the world, then we need a rather ...”

“... and that notoriety tends to deter readers who might have tried, so that the legend is self-perpetuating. On all sides, it is acknowledged as some sort of masterpeice, but it is clear that not all who praise have actually read it, because they are often uncertain about its format, having probably read only Edward Garnett’s dim-witted ...”

“... any rate. Yet his conclusion is caustic: In the poetic tradition now dominant the authoritative self, discoursing in a world of banal, empirically derived objects and relations, depends on its employment of metaphor and simile for poetic vitality ... Poets are now praised above all else as inventors of figures – as rhetoricians, in fact – with a ...”

“... obsessed with violence and with his own homosexuality, but also a sophisticated, ironic and self-consciously art-historical artist. Can we accept this? According to Van Mander’s account, ‘after a fortnight’s work’ Caravaggio would ‘sally forth for a couple of months at a time with his rapier at his side and his page behind him going from one ...”

“... of “Man” with that of the “subject”, which is gendered, “decentred”, and no longer self-determining.’ Yet it seems we go on believing in the feasibility of a decent life, although its rationale must be hard to formulate, let alone justify: certainly nothing worthy (thank God, some will say) of being called an ideology. We believe (which may ...”

“... however, until the First World War turned a broadly benevolent indifference into interest and self-interest, then into irritation, and finally into apprehension that The American Cancer (a title of 1931) threatened the French way of life. The war had bled France white, economic crisis had destabilised it further. The French began to question ...”

“... Lay aside for a moment your self-esteem and imagine that you are Jeffrey Archer. You are now a model citizen of the Post-Modern state of hyper-reality, a figure in whom actuality and invention, public fact and private fantasy, the business of government and the spinning of yarns have become utterly indistinguishable ...”

“... survivors and brutality in the destroyers’; the one from Malcolm about the necessary violence of self-defence: ‘I don’t even call it violence when it’s self-defence, I call it intelligence.’ But the quotations are not there for what they say. They are there for the meaning of the two names, their evocation of what ...”

“... music of an early morning band achieved nothing which could not have been induced by exercising self-discipline at home, taking plenty of baths and drinking water from the tap, with perhaps the odd pinch of salts from the apothecary. But the water-doctors who battened on the spa trade spread the notion that self-treatment ...”

“... does seem to relate to the way Bainbridge’s characters often encounter death when they’re most self-absorbed, most taken up with the temporary distractions of life. Chance tears through this false reality, revealing a world of instability and mortality. In some ways, it isn’t surprising that these themes are more prominent in Master Georgie than they ...”

“... of a wounded animal, twice-divorced and in permanent need of distraction. Manipulative and wildly self-absorbed, she is capable of inflicting Livia Soprano levels of damage on her offspring. Helen hasn’t exactly got the life she wanted but, as her daughter Bridget tells us, she clings to the sustaining delusion that things might change:As with her hating ...”

“... revelation and concealment. There is a wanting-to-be-known that can desolate or undermine our self-sufficiency.And now, it seems, there are things about Philip Larkin that we’ll never know. So what? Well, put it like this, the loss can be made to sound not at all what Larkin, as we know him from the poems, would have wholly wished. But then again, who ...”

“... to Jerusalem’s Mayor, Ehud Olmert, Sacks challenged Barak’s decision with another of his self-important questions: ‘is it conceivable that the Jews of any generation could give away the holy of holies of the Jewish soul? None of us, not even a democratically elected Government of Israel, has the authority to abandon the prayers and dreams of a ...”

“... these intellectual capacities had to be turned towards the systematic debunking of superficially self-evident ideas – with the existence of God once again as exhibit A. Language itself, readers had to be taught, was inherently deceptive and subject to abuse. D’Holbach began to apply this idea to politics, claiming that ‘the true principles of politics ...”

“... the final two, the language of psychotherapy starts to play a crucial role. Though the jargon of self-help is mocked throughout, At Last is explicitly about ‘closure’. It turns on the realisation that Eleanor had not just been ‘the co-victim of David’s tempestuous malice’. The deeper truth, which Patrick can only now bear to contemplate, is that ...”