“... more struck by what he called, in a characteristically prudent phrase, Russell’s ‘detailed self-absorption’. All this, one might think, would be something of a gift to a biographer: a dispersed autobiography to accompany the known facts. And yet in retrospect – in the light of this troubled and troubling second volume – one can see that Monk was ...”

“... them less life-like. A character, after all, is not a real person but a kind of ‘experimental self’, and the novel in Kundera’s hands is a ‘meditative interrogation’ conducted in the hope of getting to the heart of that self in that situation. Vital aids to this process are certain key terms. To understand ...”

“... Little exaggeration is required to describe this as a bulimic society, one bent on extremes of self-abnegation and indulgence, which allowed scant opportunity for a dispassionate attitude towards food. Medieval people don’t seem to have behaved as rationally as Parzifal did and the absence of any judicious decision-making about food consumption raises a ...”

“... and rational woman persuade herself to oppose a cause from which she has gained so much? Is it self-hatred, or misguided self-interest? Craven subservience to men, or mean-minded jealousy of the success of other women? Understandably, feminist scholars have often preferred to focus on the onward march of ...”

“... of the artist’s studio become theatre props, and the gold-fringed curtain fabric becomes eerily self-referential, recalling its use ten years earlier to represent a velvet throw on Holofernes’ bed.Artemisia, who understood – and relied on – the fact that male collectors were liable to see her face and body behind each Judith, Cleopatra or ...”

“... a few years before he disappeared into a Stalinist labour camp. A taboo on such material, whether self or socially imposed, would inflict its own kind of moral injury. For a start we should concentrate on the excellence or otherwise of the art with which the dreadful material is rendered, and A.L. Kennedy is a virtuoso of prose. Her phrasing is fine-tuned and ...”

“... in German with a commentary by him several years ago.) The entire diary is an exercise in self-observation, as Podlubny works on and overcomes his old self. He knows what happened in the villages during the deportations of millions of peasants and in the Great Famine. But he is merciless: All in all, what’s ...”

“... out other people’s crises and complaints for longer, on average, than would be merely polite.’ Self-aware to the point of self-loathing, Pete attributes his personality to being ‘raised by relatively kind parents who taught me to be polite and decent and to rely on the company and the help of others, but to also ...”

“... by civil servants from Westminster and Dublin in an attempt to provide a new, more responsive and self-justifying mechanism for concession or complaint or suasion on either side. What was called ‘the spirit of the agreement’ seemed to require and sponsor a candid coming and going between the domains of Britishness and Irishness. It seemed to allow ...”

“... of moral education. Aristotle started from the premise that ‘the good man should be a lover of self,’ and Jesus took the next step with the injunction to ‘love thy neighbour as thyself.’ In the beginning – the assumption goes – you care for nobody except yourself; but then, all being well, your selfishness will start to expand. Through the ...”

“... sometimes in his overwriting). When, for example, he says about the process of observing the self as an object, ‘emerging from self-experience proper, the subject considers where he has been’, it is integral to the process being described that we can hear the cadence of Coleridge’s glosses on ‘The Ancient ...”

“... Yeats’s notion of the anti-self or Mask, his theory that creativity is a matter of constructing a dream-identity antithetical to the natural self and the natural world, seems to me very profound and helpful – in fact, just true. ‘A writer must die every day he lives, be reborn, as it is said in the Burial Service, an incorruptible self, that self opposite of all that he has named “himself” ...”

“... functioned as the psychic, literary and physical equivalent of an auto-immune disease, a morbid self-misrecognition or mutant Socratism in which self-knowledge is disabling and identification toxic. ‘In exact proportion to the importance and urgency of any Duty was it, as of a fatal necessity, sure to be neglected ...”

“... have taken it on themselves to exclude unfairly obtained admissions of guilt; and this self-conferred power has been raised to a higher-order principle by a statutory requirement in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act to exclude confession evidence which the Crown cannot prove to have been obtained in circumstances which cast no serious doubt on ...”

“... feeling included. Successes and achievements and triumphs, like winning at the Olympics, may be self-deceiving. Popular and successful social events may be the kind of thing one doesn’t want to be part of. Or one may not have been part of them without realising it.Two months after writing about the Olympic champion, Kafka, who was himself a keen ...”