“... completely untrustworthy.’ I had to agree, but her refusal to contemplate the Kashmiri self-determination promised by her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was troubling. These days the very suggestion seems utopian. The Abdullah dynasty continues to hold power in Kashmir and is keen to collaborate with New Delhi and enrich itself. I rang a journalist in ...”

“... to the labour expended in its production. The result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labour into rent appropriated through the privatisation of knowledge. The same is true of natural resources, the exploitation of which is one of the ...”

“... What defeated it was not the fact that left-wing commentators were against it, as its leaders self-pityingly claimed, but its own complete inability to articulate policies different from those the political establishment was pushing anyway, though without the noisy nationalism. New Right intellectuals were mostly historians but they failed to understand ...”

“... expect it to go away soon. They are often right: most community-acquired intestinal infections are self-limiting and get better more quickly if left untreated. This is true even for E. coli O157. Taking antibiotics or antispasmodics is thought to increase the risk of developing the complications of kidney failure, brain damage and cardiac death. But ...”

“... the stout middle-aged Millais can’t be dismissed as a bloated parody of his earlier skinnier self. Probably no career, on extended examination, could turn on quite such simple axes. In fact they show that the later manner represents an expansion of the artist’s reach. The Pre-Raphaelite Mariana is the sum of its parts, an interior sustained by ...”

“... didn’t have to look too far for his character’s name: Forrester works with trees. There is a self-conscious aside: ‘In the European club at Simla they never tire of the joke, Forrester the forester.’ The man ‘takes a gulp from a flask of brackish water and strains in the saddle as his horse slips and rights itself, sending stones bouncing down a ...”

“... at first offered Grieve merely a convenient alter ego through whom he might enjoy the pleasures of self-contradiction. Grieve had, earlier that year, written savagely about the ‘infantilism’ of Scottish vernacular poetry, pouring particular scorn on writers so distanced from their own cultural roots that they had to glean their vocabularies from ...”

“... have to choose between describing clockwork dummies and describing himself. In any case, Leach’s self-representations were shot through with the most disconcerting contradictions. As an anthropologist, he was famously divided against himself. ‘I feel that sometimes I am both sides of the fence,’ he once confessed. During his most creative years, which ...”

“... to breakfast should never pass, in a man’s heart, for a homecoming.’ This is a portrait of self-pity that believes it is a portrait of self-laceration. But it isn’t: it’s just a portrait of self-pity. The night Mendel Shpilman was murdered, he had been playing chess: ‘It ...”

“... event for Badiou. What takes place in the Paris Commune is a moment of collective political self-determination, a making of something out of nothing – what he calls the ‘existence of an inexistant’. But, crucially, Badiou’s understanding of the Commune is freed from Lenin’s hugely influential critique in The State and Revolution, where its ...”

“... a faculty of judgment – of approval or condemnation – since in Bosch there is no aspect of the self that is unaccompanied by its opposite; the torments of hell go hand in hand with the delights of the Golden Age. ‘The Haywain Triptych’ (c.1516) The basic instinctual paraphernalia of the inner self does ...”

“... as ‘camp’, was ‘a special kind of milieu involving flamboyant decoration, consumption and self-indulgence’. This was a world of wit, food and music – luminously depicted in Adolph von Menzel’s Flute Concert at Sanssouci, which is now in Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie. But most of Frederick’s contemporaries were aware only of the king’s ...”

“... pure as a penknife/slick through the insected air’. In Wright’s work, singular, apparently self-contained things are tied to movement, plurality or process. In Zone Journals (1988), he watches the last wind of summer in the dogwood trees: ‘Across the street, flamingoing berries’.A description reveals – or implies – something about its ...”

“... With their unprecedented array of ‘lifestyle options’, their tendency to regard happiness and self-actualisation as entitlements and their habit of constantly taking their own emotional temperature, contemporary adults are poorly prepared, she argues, for the self-sacrificing work that child-rearing demands. They also ...”

“... These tonal shadings matter because post-millennials like to state their intentions clearly. Self-labelling, especially of fine-grained sexual and gendered identities, has become an ‘imperative’. They think it important to be themselves, to admit their struggles and vulnerabilities, to say what they mean. In the iGen Corpus, a digital data bank ...”