“... your pocket, keep it open. Diminish the haft affix loosely proponent span blood group indexical self-cut. Try doing it now. That final phrase is overtly sarcastic, but not without ambiguity: the urgency of the attempt and its utter impossibility and self-deception are precisely suspended. The stanza as a whole segues even ...”

“... it has been business as usual. As the American scholar Larry Bartels pointed out, 90 per cent of self-identified Republicans voted for Trump; 89 per cent of citizens who think of themselves as Democrats voted for Clinton. It isn’t surprising either that after two presidential terms for one party, there was plenty of anti-incumbent sentiment (Clinton was ...”

“... bookish, and had been educated at home by ‘a long and dreary dynasty’ of governesses. Shy and self-conscious, sure that she ‘was not pretty’, she would rather have gone to Oxford than endure the rounds of fashionable parties: she had to ‘come out’ three times, in Florence, London and New York. She wanted to belong somewhere. Years later she would ...”

“... own teenage breakdown, feelings of intense despair and, according to her brother William, severe self-repression. Withdrawn and unhappy, he recalled, she gave up chess, ‘simply because it made her too eager for a win’. Whether it was the eagerness she feared or the winning, the poems that began to appear in her journals during these miserable years ...”

“... I had drifted into doctoral research with a 2.1 from Cambridge and an unclassified O-Level in self-confidence. My friends from university, many headed for work in London, had initially been sceptical. One of them, later the deputy prime minister, worried that academic pay was crap and I’d have to read everything. Besides, decent posts were scarce. But I ...”

“... nothing special in the animal kingdom: we have no immortal soul; there is no essential human ‘self’; our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can, in principle, be modelled by the formal problem-solving rules we call algorithms; our bodily frames and mental capacities have evolved over time and there is nothing fixed ...”

“... all, fantastic analogy is the ploy developed by Dickens to match people’s strangeness and self-contradiction.’ In his novels, we look to ‘features of physique or habits of deportment’ to reveal character. Mr Merdle, the corrupt financier in Little Dorrit, appears to condemn himself, long before anyone else has, by the manner in which he greets ...”

“... building up a network of friends, and a dependency on outside forces. Bahuns grow to adulthood ‘self-righteous but without an ability to be self-critical’. Much of this picture of relaxed child-rearing applies to most ethnic groups in Nepal. What differentiates Bahuns is their attitude to women. ‘Women in Nepal ...”

“... you like’) while she was writing her own book of philosophy. There is no mistaking the self-references. Aristotle is distinctly absent from Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. Murdoch’s indexer strove valiantly to inject a little Aristotle, managing 13 entries. This feat was achieved by, for example, including a reference to the Aristotelian ...”

“... level from abstract theoretical propositions to concrete political instances. He is candid and self-revealing in a manner free from rancour and petty self-exoneration. This does not, of course, mean that he is humble or reticent about his own role, but there is a robust integrity to his account which makes it ...”

“... rules of newspaper publishing. The Magazine’s reputation on the newspaper for being frivolous, self-absorbed, anarchic, using acres of space on what appeared to be self-indulgence and money-wasting, revolved around Francis, the éminence grise. When Don McCullin and I came back from Vietnam in 1972, McCullin’s pictures ...”

“... in the mixed mode of writing about the moral life of the local community. Hoggart recognises (self-knowledge is his strong suit, often played in this book) that he shares with Cobbett ‘a touch of driven puritanism and a special hatred of ... the incivilities of presumed status’, but the greater warmth of fellow-feeling is reserved for Sturt, ‘a ...”

“... aptly described by Caryn James as an ‘idealised version’ of Malcolm’s ‘journalistic self’, sometimes refers to her own life, but more often distances herself through impersonal observation, generalisation and literary allusion. She introduces the book with a remarkable Jamesian epigraph about ‘the reporter and the reported’ from his 1896 ...”

“... he looks back at a life of ‘botched beginnings, of tasks inadequately done’. There are gloomy self-appraisals: ‘Distracted, pleasure-seeking, frivolous, ever ready to fall in with other people’s wishes, desiring to please them, fearful of losing their good will. Years wasted, slipping by hour by hour, day by day, in a routine of undertakings external ...”

“... and visual art. Visual art returns to the fore in relation to another recurring theme: that of ‘self-reference’, in the sense that, for example, the paradoxical statement ‘I am lying’ is a statement about that statement itself. More advanced work in mathematical logic, including the proof of Gödel’s Theorem, develops the concept of ...”