“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... these arguments and directs them at a generation he regards as either besotted with a belief in self-fashioning, a ‘dogmatic American voluntarism’ for which the world is ‘perpetually open’, or marked by a dialectically opposite sense of gloom and inertia deriving from a ‘culturalist or historicist hubris’ secure in the belief that nothing ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and bewildered viewpoint). Patrick can get no comfort, either, from his mother, Eleanor, a cold, self-conscious, self-absorbed heiress. By the time we join Patrick in the second novel, Bad News, he is in his mid-twenties, is in New York to collect his father’s ashes, and has become a fizzing pill of rage and grief and ...”

“... Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997), she did so, as she explained, partly in ‘self-defence’, aware that at least ‘five American biographers’ were then writing their versions of her life. Some had been in touch and had been given short shrift; others she had never met. ‘Yet another can only be concocting a book out of supposedly ...”

“... admirers subsequently liked to acknowledge. This reassessment has to take account of Joseph’s self-proclaimed conversion in 1974. The authors adduce sound reasons for doubting whether it could have been quite so sudden, quite so sweeping a revelation. Faced with the debacle that ended the Government in which he had served, perhaps this polite and ...”

“... You Also so powerful is that Steinberg doesn’t know what to make of himself: neither the younger self that he is trying to recollect nor the much older self who is struggling to write the book. He may not have liked Levi speaking for him and about him, but once he begins to reply, to answer back (and there is in almost ...”

“... in Napoleon’s Garde Impériale, and Henri Savigny, a ship’s surgeon, published a passionately self-righteous account of the disaster. Naufrage de la frégate ‘La Méduse’ became an instant bestseller. It was a timely indictment of the Restoration government, which appeared to favour fossilised émigrés like Chaumareys simply because they had remained ...”

“... and anxiety that give the novel its name and frame its action as well as his own evolving self-understanding. Intertwined with both is his transformation into a reader and a writer. The last is a slow process: reading is at first a way to protect his consciousness by giving it something to focus on. He realises it has this effect when he stays up all ...”

“... in 2008. Richard was written as an extended internal dialogue, with the voice of Edwards’s saner self interspersed with long italicised sections signalling the intrusion of darker thoughts. The plot was constrained by the known facts of Edwards’s life, but Myers did allow himself to imagine the guitarist’s death as an epiphanic moment on a hillside next ...”

“... a few years at a day school in Yorkshire, where she learned to read and write, she was entirely self-taught. The usual choices available to a late 18th-century woman without any financial provision were few and seemed to her unpleasant: paid companion, schoolteacher, or governess. In Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, she voiced a hearty distaste for ...”

“... people across 48 countries, published in 2015, indicated that women have significantly lower self-esteem than men. In trying to account for that striking finding, you can either choose to probe the brain’s self-evaluation centres and tell just-so stories about archaic humans, or you can take seriously the fact that ...”

“... leaves shiver silent chimes beyond the glass brings either the rapture [my children . . .] or self-criticism  of one who comes with a theory [. . . are an economy of scarcity] of myself there is no more evidence to admit – only consistent with limestone’s incessant weeping cave a madonna’s ...”

“... cannot be taught new tricks – and those they have are all predictable. They guard their kennels self-importantly, mark out their territory in wind and piss, bark righteously for any trifling cause. follow the pack in every bloody thing. All their affection’s of the boisterous kind – they’re awfully free with dandruff, spittle, hair. The eviller ones ...”