“... it was ‘somewhat too composed ... for me to accept it as a direct cry from the heart’. This self-legitimising complaint sits rather oddly in Hamilton’s mouth, since he admits that his own letter to Salinger had been ‘completely disingenuous’, and that he’d deliberately phrased it in a way which he imagined his subject would ‘heartily ...”

“... work of the highest originality. It is typical of Wright’s need to present himself as uniquely self-made that he was cagey about admitting influences – Sullivan apart. Gill’s book is particularly revealing about Wright’s knowledge of the work of his European contemporaries. Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s catalogue of the 1932 ...”

“... he discerned in his wife’s personality and the texture of their marriage. In equal parts self-deprecating and self-assured, emotional but not sentimental, intimate but not indiscreet, his voice is so trustworthy that it is impossible not to believe him. That’s why the few moments when he admits that the fog might ...”

“... in’. As in the film, the scene expresses a refusal to be ground down, but in a grittier, less self-glorifying way. Getting your teeth knocked out (something Anderson plays up) can be glamorous: wearing dentures for the next forty years less so. The changing-room, with its naked truths about manliness, would feature prominently in Storey’s writing over ...”

“... over and done with, as Francis Fukuyama has no doubt been discovering from his post-bag. They are self-disconfirming prophecies, Cretan Liar paradoxes which, like all appeals to make it new, add one more item to that venerable lineage known as the avant-garde. Besides, you can only break with history if you are already standing somewhere inside it, and the ...”

“... disastrous marriage, while Carr traces the couple’s unhappy history in excruciating detail. The self-portrait of illumination is fuzzy and vague as if a light were being turned not on the subject’s face, but into the viewer’s eyes; Carr’s portrait is both appealing and unflattering. This is Frankie Addams as a psychic vampire, a perennial waif who ...”

“... Emperor Qianlong, was considerably less overwhelmed. How equivocal our ‘sightings’ have been: self-deceiving, self-seeking, self-consoling or self-indulging. And yet there has been some truth there at times. The trouble with stereotypes is not that ...”

“... to reinvest their disparate memories in the newly re-established city. But by the 18th century the self-run city-state’s sovereign authority had passed to an absentee suzerain, Sultan Barqash of Zanzibar. In 1899 he leased Mogadishu to the Italians, who used it as a primary frontier settlement for several years, and later consolidated their colonial ...”

“... soul, a technique for achieving spiritual constancy and calm. Diogenes found few traces of saintly self-control in the lives of his philosophers, however, and the cumulative effect of his tales is comical rather than edifying. Take Chrysippus, who died of a fit of laughter brought on by one of his own feeble jokes; or Epimenides, who went out one day to look ...”

“... discovery of Schopenhauer – Tristan and Meistersinger. Tristan dedicates himself to death and self-destruction; Hans Sachs is a much more unambiguous self-abnegator than Wotan. It was not Wagner’s affair with Mathilde Wesendonck that gave rise to his involvement with Tristan: rather the other way round. Here Mein ...”

“... to advance the art of building by exercising imagination, became important to the architect’s self-esteem and reputation. Those who followed Roger North’s over-eager proto-professionals began to assume that their genius should mark the smallest details of the work they undertook and the erosion of the independence of the worker in stone, plaster, brick ...”

“... become, in Bainbridge’s hands, a symbol of everyone’s inability to get beyond the bounds of self. Perhaps for this reason it is the ordinary things in the story which stand out – Watson as headmaster, for example, dealing querulously with the problem of dust and horseflies in the playground, while dust in a chest of drawers is a cause of contention ...”

“... biological organism with a material identity, social person with a social identity, and individual self with a psychic identity. Another is the idea of a dialectic of matter and form. Matter in this conception is envisaged hylozoically. It is not inert but inherently amorphous, mutable, protean, ‘wild’. Form is given to it by a divinity which ...”

“... the social sciences has involved the once-mighty Social Science Research Council in acronymic self-torture. If the present Government’s narrow range of useful and acceptable disciplines means that anthropology and sociology seem destined for slow strangulation, then history, according to current rumours, is to be given a frontal lobotomy. Our present ...”

“... followed by his trials, conviction, imprisonment, exile and death. Before Wilde’s self-destructive vanity and narcissistic love for Lord Alfred Douglas impelled him to prosecute the Marquis of Queensberry, his position had been that of an ironic dandy in a brutalised and hypocritical society. Wilde defined dandyism as ‘the assertion of the ...”