“... I left the protectionof my plan & mythinking. I let my selfgo. Is this hope Ithought. Light fled.We have a worldto lose I thought.Summer fled. Thewaters rose. How do I organisemyself now. How do Ifind sufficientignorance. How do Inot summariseanything. Is this mystery,this deceptively complexlack of design. No sumtowards which to strive. No general truth ...”

“... municipal baths in another town and glance across the blue-grey of the park to where the better self I meant to be glides quietly, length by length, to his own ...”

“... Territorial and maritime boundaries are usually porous. The frontiers of virtually all self-proclaimed nations have fluctuated considerably over the centuries, while claims to a single, all- embracing nationhood are often contested from within, and/or sporadically overwhelmed or denied from without. In some countries, at some point, politicians and ...”

“... other than with the Almighty, played a secondary role. The nub of this doctrine is ‘To thine own self be true,’ where integrity – saying what one conscientiously thinks, or at least not saying what one doesn’t think – is central, just as it is in John Rawls’s theory of justice of 1971. The claim that access to speech matters doesn’t flatly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to his drunken youth and subsequent soul-saving entry into the evangelical fold, and taking self-deprecating potshots at his tricky time as part-owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team. The message was that these episodes were tests of the candidate’s resolve, temporary setbacks in the higher drama of his journey to the Texas governor’s ...”

“... It is your birthright.’ To me, Elvis was a delirium; to Bruce, he was a destiny. Bruce was a self-proclaimed Greaser whom rock’s renegade energy flushed out into the open and legitimised on the American scene. Greasers, he writes, ‘were the kids destined to live the decent hardworking lives of their parents … the future farmers, homemakers and baby ...”

“... surprise, she enjoyed the exercise. ‘The Midtown … made me looser,’ she said. Singing was self-defining: it allowed Simone increasingly to speak from her black experience, not from the white milieu of classical music. ‘I didn’t know I could improvise like that,’ she said. ‘All the time I was practising. I’d practise Bach and Beethoven and ...”

“... Sending up her closest friends, she cast the arrogant fellow graduate she was in love with as a self-centred cleric, Archdeacon Hoccleve, given to complaining loudly about his wife and numbing his congregation with abstruse sermons. Pym and her sister, Hilary, became Belinda and Harriet Bede, ‘spinsters of fiftyish’, living together in a cottage. While ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... money stock was the one and only thermostat that policymakers required to regulate an effectively self-correcting economy; second, that rules should be introduced, via what Friedman called ‘constitutional provision’, to insulate monetary governance from the temptation to meddle with an economy that was better left to its own devices. If everyone expected ...”

“... which his attention to the non-human world represents apparently grows out of Simon’s previous self-centred fetishisation of meaning: ‘I’m expecting the Significant Thing in my life to show up, the vocation,’ he says, recalling James’s too-passive hero in ‘The Beast in the Jungle’. But the novel, though disturbing, doesn’t merely mime ...”

“... the PLO which would insist on the national rights of the Palestinian people as well as Palestinian self-determination. Vance said that the US would immediately recognise the PLO and inaugurate negotiations between it and Israel. Arafat categorically turned the offer down, as he did similar offers. Then the Gulf War occurred, and because of the disastrous ...”

“... of rabbis and licensed moneylenders to the Habsburg emperors, and remained contemptuous of her self-made financier husband. She had been brought up in Vienna, for which, like many similarly placed ladies from the provinces, she yearned throughout her life. To annoy her and as a sign of protest against her attempts to cultivate a Viennese salon in ...”

“... 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 ...”