“... twin sisters, not doing well at school, seeking escape in solitary writing. Irritable, charmless, self-conscious and endlessly introspective, Nina was Auden’s frowning schoolgirl dying to be asked to stay. She particularly hoped for boys’ attention, but even girls’ friendship was hard to achieve. Nina didn’t like being a girl: she wanted to be a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the implied contrast with an imagined ‘real’ intelligentsia has a long history in British self-definition. But even if any relatively distinctive pattern could be established here (scholarship on intellectuals in other European countries suggests no great distinctiveness is involved), there is no way to ‘read off’ political or other convictions ...”

“... stopped-up bowels, Jewish angst and mother-woe, revived and inflamed accusations that Roth was a self-hating Jew, an enemy of his own people peddling filth. ‘Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew Jew! It is coming out of my ears already, the saga of the suffering Jews! Do me a favour, my people, and stick your suffering heritage up your suffering ass – I happen also to be ...”

“... fascinating pop star alive. A black R’n’B artist who juggled shiny white pop signifiers; a self-amused imp who had us follow his playfully dense personal mythology from work to work, never knowing what we might find next time round, in what form he would return, sometimes mere months later. Dirty Mind in no way predicts Around the World in a Day ...”

“... designs on the play. It leans, that is to say, too heavily on time as a circumstance outside the self. Early in Cymbeline, Posthumus, exiled in Rome, is asked what he will do to help himself, and he answers that he plans nothing but to ‘abide the change of Time,/Quake in the present winters state, and wish/That warmer dayes would come’. The gentleness is ...”

“... subtle, gentle and sensitive, and he confesses himself happy to do without ‘misogynist satire, self-congratulation, smut’. He has left these to the other John, whose anthology is bold, noisy, rude, aggressive and full of itself, all of which things love can be, too, given half a chance. Neither editor is taking any chances, though. Fuller’s book, which ...”

“... is understood to include isolated acts of exhibitionism by a stranger, and sequels such as low self-esteem in adult life are accepted as caused by such events, it is not surprising, as the authors of Children’s Sexual Encounters with Adults point out, that an alarming picture of CSA can very readily be developed. The most serious omission from this book ...”

“... analytic) intelligence, that they don’t need to keep secrets from themselves. Or that self-consciousness doesn’t have to be crippling, opposed to an awareness of the world. Characters in Kundera acquire psychologies and histories, but they start out and continue to function chiefly as images, provocations: a man staring at a wall, or repeating a ...”

“... stories, about the inner life, about the value of the everyday world, and about views of self-expression stemming from the Romantic movement. The first story is about the shift, between Greek times and now, towards emphasising the inner life. Plato’s picture of the soul ruling the body does not make much of the inwardness of the soul. The modern ...”

“... drastically selective way. Its aim, as has often been noted, is more spiritual exhortation then self-revelation, or, more precisely, it is an exposition of the divine scheme with reference to a particular life-experience. As Henry Chadwick observes in the judicious introduction to his useful new English version, in explaining the role of the philosophic ...”

“... a now much scorned Enlightenment rationality. In this sense, a theory of the body runs the risk of self-contradiction, recovering for the mind just what was meant to deflate it; but if the body provides us with a little sensuous certitude in a progressively abstract world, it is also an elaborately coded affair, and so caters to the intellectual’s passion ...”