“... of signalling the emotional necessity of a new physical wound is to make it, shockingly, virtually self-inflicted. (Tristan drops his sword at the end of Act Two and lets the treacherous Melot run him through.) Amfortas had already been seduced by Kundry – Klingsor’s spear just made that wound literal. In Wagner’s misogynistic logic a woman, who ...”

“... they are branded in me. Long before I read Nietzsche, I was offended by the slavishness of this self-abasement. The belittling of the human, the superstitious fear and the blackmail, seemed almost pagan to me. Augustine, the great early theologian, the North African bishop heavily influenced by Neoplatonism, is in many ways the patron saint of this pagan ...”

“... history can say something definite, but not trivial, about this subject. Not only academic self-respect but, in a sense, the self-respect of 20th-century Western attitudes at large are tied up in the question. If ‘Victorian’ does not correctly connote a special point of view about sex, at least one prevailing ...”

“... like the rest.* Maybe. But no other writer in this field so regularly startles one into self-recognition. We skitter anxiously from cradle to grave like a tart between lamp-posts. I won’t make you feel bad so long as you don’t make me feel bad. That is the social contract. And there is nothing much to be done about it. Goffman’s work, as he ...”

“... years past. The Treaty recognised the whole of Ireland as a unit to be accorded sovereignty as a self-governing Dominion of the British Commonwealth a year later, albeit with an option for the six north-eastern counties to quit this new all-Ireland state within one month of its establishment, by the vote of a majority of the Northern Provincial ...”

“... we begin to suspect Byron of sharing. Yet Byron made a loyal friend, to men at least. The self-absorption conveyed by Byron has been exaggerated by the insistent style of Raphael’s narration and by the one-sidedness of his interests. On Byron’s short-lived and disastrous marriage to Annabella Milbanke, Raphael is in his element, as a ...”

“... of putatively occult phenomena. Since the late 1880s Flournoy, whose deceptively chivalrous, self-effacing manner concealed a penetrating forensic intelligence, had eagerly sought a medium on whom to test his evolving theories about the relationship between trance phenomena and the psychopathology of the unconscious. Introduced to Smith in 1895, he at ...”

“... an island even if it isn’t one physically – in its atypicality as an Indian city; in its self-containment and complex extremes of wealth and destitution. Bombay was officially renamed Mumbai in 1996, after the Shiv Sena Party, in an alliance with the BJP, came to power in Maharashtra (the state whose capital is Bombay), and the permanent leader of ...”

“... grown in step with the expansion of Anglo-America’s intellectual and cultural capital. Lilla, a self-declared ‘centrist liberal’, arrived at his present position by way of working-class Detroit, evangelical Christianity and an early flirtation with neoconservatism. The British writers belong to a traditional elite; shared privilege transcends ...”

“... Eva indulged in ‘monotonous whining monologues’ that Larkin characterised as ‘resentful, self-pitying, full of funk and suspicion’. But it was precisely the viciousness of this circle that produced its opposite in Larkin’s poetry, which combines his father’s penchant for the controlling lapidary utterance (‘Life is first boredom, then ...”

“... large, these scholars were middle-class or upper-middle-class, the children of academics, doctors, self-made businessmen. If they were posh, they were interestingly so, like the brilliant mathematician and future Fields medallist Timothy Gowers, whose father was a composer and whose great-great-grandfather had been a famous neurologist. Or they came from ...”

“... Neoliberalism​ is often conceived as a system of self-regulating markets, shrunken states and crudely rational individuals. Early neoliberals, however, didn’t believe in markets’ self-correcting properties. Instead, as Quinn Slobodian argues in Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, they were concerned above all with establishing governments, laws and institutions in which markets could be embedded in order to make them work as they should – not only at a national but at a global level ...”

“... structured account of her personal anguish and where it took her, without my childish, intrusive self chattering a comparative commentary. As with my own experience of psychotherapy, and life in general, self-knowledge on its own doesn’t seem to change anything very much. Taylor describes herself when she was at her most ...”

“... This man has a discerning eye for the details of attractive female presentation: he can see her self through her clothes, not just her body and income. Catherine, in turn, inwardly admires the set of Henry’s hat and the capes of his greatcoat. The sexual appeal of dress was not an appropriate topic for public conversation between men and women, but in ...”

“... was always a whacked-out right wing to make bellicose liberals look moderate.) In the self-congratulatory atmosphere that enveloped American public discourse after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kennan’s doctrine became the key to what in retrospect seemed inevitable. One problem with this account is that it leaves out Kennan himself. Almost ...”