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“... to watch it. The experience of reading his analyses of such phenomena is flattering to one’s self-esteem: Greif recruits a reader who can take pleasure from his knowing critiques while also feeling ‘Ah yes, I see (but lots of people don’t).’ At the same time, this inevitably generates an anxiety about falling off the pace, a worry that one is only ...”

“... again and again according to the perceptions of social pundits: with each recasting and each self-appointed recaster of Marx representing the texture of current thought, we’ll have a chance to observe something about our state of mind, while, if we were there before, we can comfort ourselves with the notion that our Marx – naturally – was the real ...”

“... in Jonathan Dimbleby’s interim (and interminable) biography that Prince Charles is reflective or self-aware enough to have grasped this sad, simple and vital truth. To be sure, we are repeatedly informed that he is drawn to history, nostalgia, heritage and tradition. But the first of these is not easily reconciled with the rest. Despite having read history ...”

“... device. This is perfectly illustrated by the alien suit: it emphasises an awkwardness which is it-self not entirely foreign to Grant, and places him in a broader awkwardness, a big brother scenario; the suit frames him, in both senses of the word. There is another game being played here. Roger Thornhill thinks he’s involved in a case of mistaken ...”

“... cannot account for by the ordinary Methods of Knowledge, and Principles of Reason. Enthusiasm was self-deception hardened into certainty, ‘Men being most forwardly obedient to the impulses they receive from themselves’. It was ridiculous (hence Locke’s dry tone), but powerful. Locke passed his intellectual curiosity about the powers of enthusiasm to his ...”

“... case work. And finally there are the multiples themselves, some of whom organise themselves into self-help groups, publish newsletters and the like. What is multiple personality disorder? During the 19th century British doctors wrote of ‘double consciousness’. Typically a patient had two states, one vivacious, one inhibited. There was one-way ...”

“... aspects of personality whose importance can be recognised without upsetting the model of the self as a system of checks and balances. A mood may be dominant, but it passes; one feeling gives way to another. The passions, on the other hand, are ‘thorough’, sudden and monarchical; they possess us completely, lift us out of the realm of choice and ...”

“... own can turn out to have been someone else’s all along. Being possessive doesn’t make one self-possessed, and White makes great play in this fascinating and archly mischievous book with ideas of ownership, sexual and otherwise. By calling his first chapter ‘My Shrinks’, and the following chapters ‘My Father’, ‘My Mother’, ‘My ...”

“... runs through all he says and does that vein of irony by which we may so often mark one of life’s self-acknowledged failures … a man of parts without character and with more wit than sense.’ The actor offers no comment, but by now he doesn’t need to. David Gates, the creator of these connoisseurs of disappointment and ...”

“... universal manhood – progress, sovereignty, free will, moral truth, reason – as exclusivist and self-serving creations of white, heterosexual bourgeois males. In the regime of deindustrialisation and globalised financial capitalism that followed the oil crisis of 1973, man would be increasingly deprived of his work ethic (and ...”

“... cedes to the Department of the Environment. It might be called a modern affliction: an excess of self-consciousness, a doing of things by rules, a misplaced hungering for certainty. In every sphere of life we find a new kind of attention imposed, drawn out from within the experience and directed at the idea of the experience. Nothing is spared. The growth of ...”

“... like someone embarrassed by his own seriousness rather than a natural satirist. He seemed unduly self-conscious about being committed to anything other than himself as a writer, and the studied recklessness of his remarkable style. There are novelists who want to interest the reader in their characters, and novelists who want to interest us in themselves. In ...”

“... got closest in Late Call). A.S. Byatt has written well about her desire to write what she calls ‘self-conscious realism’; but her realism is seldom deep enough to warrant its self-consciousness. Margaret Drabble appears to want to combine Dickens and Woolf, to combine caricature and experimental forms, but can create ...”

“... usually a real breakdown in the overall coherence of memory systems and the accompanying sense of self.’ They come ‘because they feel dreadful … not because they do not know if God exists or how to read the weather’. In short, ‘in psychotherapy one is not trying to establish objective truth’ but rather to find ‘a means of containing ...”

“... to be known. It is we who know them, because we know at least something about them: that they are self-ignorant. They are rich cavities, into which we pour a kindly offering: if we are the only ones who can provide the knowledge they lack about themselves, then we ourselves have become that lack, have become a part of them. V.S. Naipaul’s Mr Biswas belongs ...”