“... agitation brought women onto the streets in unprecedented numbers. Both movements fostered self-confidence and a sense of entitlement; they gave women a political vocabulary in which to describe their experience. Live-in service came increasingly to be understood as no better than Victorian vassalage. Where other work was available, particularly in ...”

“... The present-day offence fails – signally – to differentiate between the intervener who, out of self-interest or perversion, helps to ensure that a suicide attempt succeeds, and the individual who, out of compassion, gives a rational fellow being the help he or she needs to end a life that has become medically unbearable. This is what the 1961 Suicide ...”

“... hoarding of insignificant objects, of their need to pass them on – to a loved one, to a future self, to an unknown posterity.In old age​ , her grandfather Nikolai became increasingly fixated on his own memories, time and again recounting to his daughter-in-law the same painful stories of his poverty-stricken childhood. Unlike Stepanova’s other ...”

“... the principles out in 1950 in Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, the bestselling self-help treatise in which he presents rationality as our birthright. The human mind, he wrote, is a perfect computer corrupted by ‘incorrect data’. He urged readers to reflect on their lives and ask themselves: ‘Where is the error?’ With the help of a ...”

“... traditional’, wanting to feel ‘centred’ in their own homes; many see it as an aspect of self-help, unearthing the ancient art of drudgery and reclaiming it for themselves. In the lifestyle sphere of social media, people are making cleaning not only their hobby, their job, their purpose and their lifeline: they are making it their philosophy, and a ...”

“... a great many middle-class intellectuals of the post-war period find useful for the purposes of self-definition.’ Yes, I would have been tempted to think Lodge was over-egging it too, if I’d happened to read his essay only a couple of months ago. But then I read High Fidelity, and started seeing exactly what Lodge meant. Just look back at the very top ...”

“... she was on the tall side and had something of the loose-limbed quality of a comic actor, goofy and self-conscious, good-humoured but perhaps also a bit asexual. Being the product of a postfeminist education, he immediately realises that his assessment is a bit unkind, but justifies himself by recalling that ‘many of his friends were far colder and more ...”

“... The battle of the ‘little man’ with daily disobligingness is a classic New Yorker trope; the self-generating litany pure Barthelme.This example comes from ‘Down the Line with the Annual’, a story from 1964 about a couple who turn to consumer reports to anchor themselves when everything else seems to be ‘falling apart at an accelerated ...”

“... reconciliation of conflicting emotional ideas. The poet learns to induce the trance in self-protection whenever he feels unable to resolve an emotional conflict by simple logic … As soon as he has thus dissociated himself from the poem, the secondary phase of composition begins: that of testing and correcting on commonsense principles, so as to ...”

“... the 1950s and 1960s, and who created the (sometimes accurate) public image of unions as corrupt, self-serving bureaucracies. During the early 1970s, as competition from reconstructed postwar economies brought a decline in the corporate rate of profit, American capital began its migration from industry to finance. Sacking workers became the surest way to ...”

“... he might win the Nobel Prize. Also, perhaps, though she doesn’t quite say so, because a heroic self-image compensated for a career that didn’t work out as well as he’d hoped. It seems that he was British: he had a ‘BBC accent’ and liked to quote George Steiner, his former teacher, on eros’s role in the classroom. But for decades he lived in ...”

“... from the outset offering instruction on the difference between the essential and the existential self. This kind of thing must have been hard going for the audience, which had presumably come to hear about Shakespeare and wasn’t expecting Kierkegaard and the like; and it still doesn’t always seem very transparent on the page. The excuse for its first ...”

“... to Germany in two world wars, Joan of Arc and General de Gaulle are central to the French national self-image and F.D. Roosevelt is central to the story of America’s interwar economic recovery, and Nelson Mandela is central to South Africa’s new-found racial harmony. Exalted company for our two great heroes – but surely justified? Not according to the ...”

“... discredit Coleman’s evidence by drawing attention to his past unreliability. But the judge, Ed Self, a George W. Bush appointee, would hear none of it. The revelations of Coleman’s unfitness for the job, his debts, his violent temper, his racism, weren’t permitted as evidence. One by one, the defendants fell. Donnie Smith was sentenced to 12 years in ...”

“... wanted only this of herself, a woman who at her marriage was neither thoughtless nor completely self-effacing. Martha was a voracious reader of John Stuart Mill, Dickens and Cervantes, though her husband-to-be warned her against the rude bits unsuitable for a woman in Don Quixote. She was interested in music and painting, and had no shortage of ...”