“... 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 ...”

“... taken for granted, he can thank his awesome productivity, which he compares in his autobiography, Self-Consciousness (1989), to his psoriatic over-production of skin, and the sheer availability of his personal life and voice in novels, articles, television appearances and interviews. Though he is an intensely intellectual writer – his early novels undertake ...”

“... that inspired Ebenezer Howard and his moral-religious moonshine about rehousing the nation in self-sufficient towns of 30,000 as to be almost fair to him. He digs out the many roots of Howard’s mission, notably its debt to Henry George’s single-tax campaign for land reform, popular in its time, forgotten today. He seems half aware that the garden city ...”

“... fantasists are too solipsistic, these figures are too relentlessly outward-looking for corrective self-scrutiny. Bernard, like Joe, loses the woman he loves, accused by her of being obsessed with rationality at the expense of emotion. McEwan’s first two novels thrived on the contrast between the scrupulous clarity of his writing and the resonant oddness of ...”

“... Like the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is the source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of freedom and fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas uses to characterise the relation between God and humanity.Dawkins, who is as ...”

“... very interestingly, a shift in Milton from an early belief in the plain intelligibility and ‘self-sufficiency’ of scripture to a later belief that scripture requires careful interpretation. With a nod to Derrida, he calls the factor of interpretation a ‘supplement’ and then concludes, with characteristic exaggeration, that respect for scripture as ...”

“... Meet the Mad Gasser of Mattoon, Gef the Talking Mongoose and, more prosaically, Doug and Dave, self-confessed manufacturers of crop circles. Thrill to ‘penis panic’ – five dead in Benin. If that’s too culture-specific, consider joining an epidemic of mass-psychogenic illness: dizzy spells and vomiting seem to be international in their appeal and ...”

“... The modern Republican Party was born of revolution. In the early 1960s, right-wing insurgents – self-consciously using the model of Communist cells – took over the GOP, repudiated the moderation of its leaders, among them President Eisenhower and the New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and built a formidable counter-establishment infrastructure that ...”

“... health conditions: population-level surveys, administrative data (including rates of diagnosis), self-reporting and so on. None provides a definitive answer as to who is ‘ill’ and who is not.The evidence shows that depression and anxiety rates among young people began to climb around 2010. The pandemic, by contrast, saw a dramatic rise in the ...”

“... it and bent to look at it and the moonlight ran down her back’: Murray is right that Chris’s self-examination is also a display put on for the reader, a north-east of Scotland odalisque. She’s also right that the frequency of such episodes across the books is odd.Chris Guthrie was unavoidable at Aberdeen Grammar School in the academic year ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one of a whole series of metaphysical fictions which includes agents, objects, mental acts and the self. The fact that the self can be found in this list is one reason why getting shot of substance is not as simple as it might appear. If it cannot be allowed simply to drop out of the picture, it is partly because we may find ...”

“... man in the Hathaway shirt’). Up swelled one of those colossal bubbles of pompous self-regard, enclosing account execs and art directors and copywriters, that leave their sticky residue on history. It’s a commonplace that portrayal of the past can be used to criticise the present. What of those cases in which criticism of the past is used to ...”

“... after the Revolution in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison, told me that my writing was deeply self-censored. I had left out the juicy stuff: the neighbour’s lesbian relationships, the opium addicts, the widespread plastic surgery, his incarceration. I did it to ‘protect people’, I told him. I wasn’t trying to sell books, I was trying to sell a ...”