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“... gum flies to me on the subway and sticks’), and betrays an ambivalent egocentricity: that of a self towards which even rubbish gravitates. His is not the magnetism of a compelling personality, however. Gray typifies, even cultivates, ordinariness. It is his extreme passivity which is so attractive, his longing for identity that draws in the surrounding ...”

“... Paris, tells a different story, however: that of a woman who questioned her femininity through self-analysis. The account is woman-centred yet curiously devoid of women, as friends, colleagues or patients. Instead, it transpires, Horney made men her all. It was discrimination against her sex, she wrote as a teenager, that launched her into ...”

“... doesn’t treat choice as straightforwardly as Thomas claims, and it’s certainly not the hymn to self-reliance that patriotic Emersonians have sometimes wished it to be. According to the poem’s logic, the choices are as good as each other, and so taking the road more travelled would also have made all the difference. But for Thomas, the issue was not the ...”

“... be expected of other people? Are not so many of life’s activities a means of escaping from self-knowledge? How many people could persevere, if they knew in their hearts they were quite unimportant . . . No, the world, including the majority of the members of the Church, is still not converted, because they do not believe Jesus Christ when he ...”

“... wandering the urban sprawl, collecting pay cheques from the highest bidder. He is latently self-destructive, stripped of family, a figure who slides towards pathos and even absurdity (Peter Sellers as moustache-twitching Gallic ingénu). At the beginning of the trail, the central event has already happened; the detective, divested of any power to abort ...”

“... oneself as a stranger, the multiple are all ways of describing the breakdown of a consensus in a self conceived of as, at least potentially, unified. But once the self has been described like this – and split in these various ways to make something more manageable – the question arises of whether anyone is in ...”

“... George Hayim, candid homosexual masochist, globe-scampering self-gratifier, unabashed lifelong idler, one-book novelist, offers, for what it’s worth, his life story. Born in 1920, the son of an adulterous, wealthy Shanghai stockbroker whom he hated, and a Shanghai mother whom he adored, Hayim recalls an incident in his childhood when his father punished him for swearing by sticking a pin in his lip ...”

“... himself as he paints, and Velasquez looks back at us through the eyes of a court dwarf. This self-involvement may all the more readily be found in literature since most poets tend to be experts on themselves. Outgoing and unegoistic as he was, Keats shows himself in his letters to be endlessly articulate on himself and his writing, and the ...”

“... as well as five London houses. Jonathan Richardson in 1736 A small selection of astonishing self-portrait drawings, on view at the Courtauld’s new Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery until 20 September, shows how, after he had turned 61, Richardson compiled a visual diary, regularly scrutinising his appearance by means of mirrors and from all ...”

“... of the outsider: the only acceptable Jew is the non-Jew. In his view, ‘the ubiquitousness of self-hatred ... has shaped the self-awareness of those treated as different perhaps more than they themselves have been aware.’ He does not make the unacceptably glib point that the Jews simply colluded in their own ...”

“... Imprisoned though he is in that wonderfully self-satisfied French tradition of announcing and defining, Derrida must none the less be said to be spot-on about diaries. He says in Of Grammatology: ‘I can answer the threat of the other as other (than I) only by transforming it into another (than itself) through altering it in my imagination ...”

“... about yourself. Whether the life history of someone forced into sex work reflects their true self, or whether self-narration might also be self-deception, are questions that seemingly don’t trouble this line of argument. What if someone tells contradictory stories about ...”

“... sensibility, the minute detail, the morbid consciousness of every thought and feeling ... the self-involution and dreamlike continuity’, like ‘a sick room heated by stoves’ contrasted with Fielding, who resembles ‘an open lawn, on a breezy day in May’. Most of the themes of Richardson criticism, before and since, are contained in Coleridge’s ...”

“... acting seriously. By Last Tango in Paris, brooding power had turned to blubbery narcissism, and self-parody, it seemed, had come to stay. More recently, though having agreed to do a pastiche of his Godfather performance for The Freshman, a negligible vehicle, he responded with a largely unlooked-for sophistication – charming, precise, delieiously ...”

“... vast mess of his life, decides to improve one small part of it: his handwriting.My graphological self-therapy begins today. This method (suggested a while ago by a crazy friend) stems from the notion – which is central to graphology – that there’s a profound connection between a person’s handwriting and his or her character, and from the behaviourist ...”