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“... Didion’s previous book, Where I Was From, was a study of the myth of California, a vision of self-reliance peculiar even for America, informed by legends of a complete break with the Eastern past, the harsh 19th-century crossing of the Rockies to get to the golden land on the other side, where it turned out that ...”

“... is the means by which people seek to be conscious of themselves. It is that relationship between self-consciousness, or subjectivity, and sexuality that we want to explore. Few people today would subscribe to Brillat-Savarin’s ‘Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you who you are,’ but a translation of this dictum to the field of sex does command ...”

“... in the National Portrait Gallery, depicting his sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne with his own self-portrait in the group obliterated: a ghostly absence that haunts the composition in the form of a tall column of paint. Branwell, as the only brother in a family of sisters, must have had a similar struggle to Edvard. But Branwell never resolved the gender ...”

“... Calvinist in A Tale of a Tub a perfect type of the parvenu in whom moral rectitude cloaks corrupt self-interest, the upwardly mobile person undoubtedly steals the show, though by no means always winning the day. The book-keeper hero of Henry Neville’s Isle of Pines (1668) is one that does come out on top, but in a rather special way. Shipwrecked on a desert ...”

“... intend to use them. The practice of confession raises all sorts of slippery issues about truth, self-deception, intentionality and the like, most of them subtly dissected in Peter Brooks’s rich, stodgily written new study. The fact that Brooks is an American is not accidental in this respect, since after Stalinist Russia the US is surely the most ...”

“... describes in theoretical terms a special kind of character: insecure, dependent on others for self-respect, subject to grandiose images of the self, and filled with anger. This character Lasch explores to some effect: bringing out, for instance, the fact that its baseless ...”

“... comparisons is especially strong when it comes to Rachel Cusk, who so often plays with forms of self-portraiture. This novel is her first since Kudos (2018), the last in her Outline trilogy, which is narrated by an impassive Cusk-alike who endures the long-winded, implausible and often grimly hilarious monologues of ...”

“... It took another finger-wagging text to make the connection: Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences, in both SEXES Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice . . . etc was published anonymously sometime between 1708 and 1716. In ...”

“... The ghost’s presentation of washing as a rite of explation and atonement, a romance of self-purification in which labour is invisible or performed by lesser beings, has a familiarity that the priest and his wife, as the official and unofficial commentators on this fiction, do not acknowledge. For it is of course the presentation familiar from ...”

“... American realism, because her own writing is about as far from that tradition as possible. Self-conscious and sometimes excessively self-referential, her novels are more concerned with mood and gesture than such illusionistic effects as natural-sounding dialogue, unobtrusive plot development or the matching of ...”

“... an illusory shaping of violence and cowardice into a form conducive to happiness. This habit of self-protection in the memoirs is one which Quinn identifies by analogy with his own war recollections: an instinct for self-preservation highlighted under conditions of great stress. The concealment of language is seen as an ...”

“... speaker’s words reflect the longing to tell her story but also show constraint, hesitation and self-mistrust. In speaking at all, she seems to be combating a momentous counterforce, or pair of counterforces: the seduction of silence and the temptation of falsehood. Utterance in Glück’s poems appears to occupy a narrow, liminal space, or to chart an ...”

“... about reading Erving Goffman in the late 1960s and early 1970s: Asylums, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and, I think, Stigma. They were required reading, part of the unofficial University of Pelican Books course on gathering information and ideas about the world. Month by month, titles came out by Laing and Esterson, Willmott and ...”

“... Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others by Hizbullah militants on 12 July. The right of self-defence identified by Blair and Bush is part of international law. Which makes two conclusions possible: either this area of international law is so elastic as to be inoperative; or it is being interpreted by Blair and Bush in an untenable way. There are two ...”

“... by the presence of an artist whose appearance is as distinct and as recognisable as his work. Self-portrait by Annibale Carracci (c.1575) Portrait of the Artist, an exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery (until 17 April), includes two images of Hockney. All the paintings, the prints and the sculpture are from the royal collection, which possesses an ...”