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“... Christopher Lasch, who died last year, has been rather undernoticed in Britain. His attention was admittedly focused on American politics and political thinking, but his fears and anxieties translate readily enough to a Britain showing many of the same symptoms of social and political disaffection, while his politics and his polemical style were those of an urbanised Cobbett – radical, popular, egalitarian and quite unplaceable on a left-right spectrum ...”

“... prevalent among the chattering classes of northern California, you will probably agree with Christopher Lasch that theirs is a culture of narcissism. If you rather admire these people’s attitudes and way of life, you may describe it as a culture of tolerance. If you have mixed feelings, you might settle for the description Charles Taylor ...”

“... All around him in American society Lasch sees intellectual and moral feebleness, cultural decay, despair and inner rage. There is no personal love, only a snatching at gratification, or domestic skirmishes in the war of all against all. There is no politics, only manipulation; no radical protest, only street theatre; no education, only organised illiteracy ...”

“... completely professional during the past three decades, tennis deserves a place of honour in what Christopher Lasch called the culture of narcissism. A sport of skilful, well-mannered ladies and gentlemen has metamorphosed into a brutal confrontation between unpleasant, physically overdeveloped and remorselessly single-minded hitters, which is controlled ...”

“... be somebody, maybe even one of the Real People. ‘He cannot live without an admiring audience,’ Christopher Lasch writes of the pathological narcissist: ‘The popularity of the confessional mode testifies, of course, to the new narcissism that runs all through American culture.’ In The Culture of Narcissism ...”

“... for dissection in his Anatomy. The others are Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Alasdair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch and Roberto Unger. To choose Maistre as one’s point of departure is to set a provocative, not to say lurid tone. There are occasions when he can sound as reasonable in his critique of the Revolution or the Enlightenment as, say, Burke or ...”

“... Bowlby-stuck judges to realise that fathers can look after their children’. Self-obsession, what Christopher Lasch calls ‘pathological narcissism’, is the third cause of our advanced divorce rate. Gathorne-Hardy doesn’t mention Lasch, but in a chapter entitled ‘The Privilege Bulge’ he writes about the same ...”

“... part of the Academy, still function outside it as public figures – Chomsky, for instance, or Christopher Lasch. It seems to me to be a narrow and chauvinistic view of United States culture that does not take stock of the interesting role played by the non-American, non-native intellectuals who have lived and worked in the country. Think of José ...”

“... then declare that their privacy needs to be protected from the flash of the paparazzo’s camera. Christopher Lasch, writing well ahead of Big Brother and the tide of reality TV shows, noted in The Culture of Narcissism that ‘modern life is so thoroughly mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their actions – and ...”

“... Bellow’s claim to his own royalties. C.W.E. Bigsby also sounds mechanical when he quarrels with Christopher Lasch over narcissism: ought it to be diagnosed as the vice of the Seventies, since Joe Orton’s work proves that it was endemic in the Sixties? Here literature illuminates sociology, rather than the other way about. Other contributors to the ...”

“... of that thesis as a unifying theme. The development of age-segregated housing belongs to what Christopher Lasch, a more bitter but sometimes more trenchant commentator than FitzGerald, calls the ‘culture of narcissism’ – a concept that is curiously absent from FitzGerald’s vocabulary. Like the passengers on the Mayflower and Arabella, the ...”

“... Austin and Searle. But few people would construct a portrait of the essential West using only Christopher Lasch on narcissism, the words of a fundamentalist preacher, Plato’s Cratylus, an advertising jingle or two, and (as an instance of the West’s inability to believe in a stable or beneficent reality) Ovid’s Metamorphoses laced with choice ...”

“... upheavals going on around them. By contrast, the women were ‘fully paid-up members of what Christopher Lasch described as “the therapeutic society”’, constructing their ‘selves’ through conscious effort and reflection. I am not so sure. Caroline, clinging to a loveless marriage while deploring the moral laxity of her times, hardly seems ...”

“... His arrival at Harvard brought on homesickness and haemorrhoids. He roomed for three years with Christopher Lasch, later the social historian who wrote The Culture of Narcissism (of which Updike was arguably an exemplar; certainly many of his characters were, particularly Harry Angstrom). Begley quotes Lasch’s ...”

“... discusses some of these (Niebuhr, Baldwin, Chomsky) while puzzlingly omitting, among others, Christopher Lasch, who offered sustained critiques of the peculiarly American reconfigurations of the idea of universal man. Those capable of really examining the power elites and the culture of narcissism – and the oracles warning against the fire next ...”