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“... what alternative concepts they would recommend, they usually reply that the question is premature. Self-criticism must come first. We need to deconstruct the metaphysics of presence, or to become aware of the repressive character of the most benevolent-looking of contemporary institutions, or to see the distortions induced by innocuous-seeming linguistic ...”

“... serious – whether their stated beliefs are authentic, or merely devised to achieve a certain self-presentation or outcome. Campaign polls, social media, ‘progressive’ politicians, ‘populist’ politicians, journalists invoking ‘free speech’ and ‘democracy’, quack doctors invoking science, your Facebook friends invoking quack ...”

“... last April. The paper commissioned the cartoons in a bid to fight the insidious pressure of ‘self-censorship’. Now a largely conservative Continental press has lined up like a bunch of drunk undergraduates, convinced of their rectitude, to moon at conservative Muslim sentiment. ‘Slay those who insult Islam’: a placard at the demonstration outside ...”

“... was faint. ‘From an early age’, Jean Moorcroft Wilson writes, Thomas ‘felt cursed by a self-consciousness he believed the chief cause of his later problems and depression’. It made him at once shy and withdrawn but also equivocal in his writing, careful to qualify what he said, and wary of self-assertion. A ...”

“... intrigue which forced him to leave his beloved British Museum’, he scrupulously avoids self-pity. But self-satisfaction and self-righteousness were certainly not purged by keeping the journal. His intelligence and sensitivity often distanced him from the art of the past which ...”

“... pieces. So one will not really have had an ‘I’ at all. One’s poems, and one’s self, will just be better or worse instances of familiar types. This is what Harold Bloom calls ‘the strong poet’s anxiety of influence’, his or her ‘horror of finding oneself to be only a copy or a replica’. On this reading of Larkin’s poem, what ...”

“... this mirror in growing away from its mother, it is also the site of the loss of a stable sense of self. For in the next, Symbolic Stage, the father breaks in with his phallus to generate the Oedipal conflict. Now language breaks the spell of the magic mirror, and the child develops into that mythological beast, the speaking animal. (Some animal behaviourists ...”

“... this perhaps had to be the case. For presumably, to experience happiness, you need to possess a Self, an ‘I’, something more than a constructed and grammatical ‘Subject’ – a thing which Foucault was not ready to grant. He had arrived on the philosophical scene at the ‘structuralist’ moment, marked by a decisive shift to the doctrine of the ...”

“... as she says in one of her interviews – ‘for what your life has meant to you’. The more self-centred and confiding writers become, the less likely we are to know them. Although insistingly, sometimes touchingly, and more often tiresomely there, they hide themselves in their own ink. Whereas writers more sparing in their ...”

“... chiefly from his treatment of the human figure, in his portraits especially, and above all, the self-portraits he painted in his old age. In the current exhibition in the National Gallery basement, seventy-odd likenesses of the artist have been brought together. Its central hall, holding more than a dozen of the late ...”

“... in a way that leaves him empty of personal charm, but also generates a suspicion that the self-effacing anatomist of passion might have a monstrously high opinion of himself. Wells’s autobiographies repeatedly do this kind of thing. At some level, in some corner of his brain, he knew that his readers would find his own descriptions of his behaviour ...”

“... poets were showing what can happen when art is no longer thought of as imitation, but rather as self-creation. These poets made it plausible for art to claim the place in culture traditionally held by religion and philosophy, the place which the Enlightenment had claimed for science. In the course of the last two centuries, these two tendencies have joined ...”

“... at the end of the 18th century,’ he says later, ‘did the problem of modernity’s self-reassurance come to a head in such a way that Hegel could grasp this question as a philosophical problem, and indeed as the fundamental problem of his own philosophy.’ Given this definition of what makes us moderns modern, Habermas is quite justified in ...”

“... capturing the quotidian and resists the charms of art, but ends up as art anyhow. Keats is no less self-conscious, but his poem works in almost the opposite way: he is wholly smitten with the charms of art (‘the viewless wings of Poesy’) and ordinariness surprises his poem like the breaking of a spell (‘the fancy cannot cheat so well/As she is famed to ...”

“... of 23 years before The Fox in the Attic (the nominal focus of my piece), which was conceived as a self-contained story but ended up as the first volume of a trilogy: getting started is half the problem; knowing when to stop is the other. The second volume, The Wooden Shepherdess, took another 12 years and, though it has its moments, feels messy and ...”