“... 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 ...”

“... Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the 1960s generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal ...”

“... and how do we make descriptive and prescriptive distinctions between the inalienable components of self and the commodifiable bits of not-self? What are the rights and values pertaining to this ‘we’ whose configuration advances in biomedical science require us to decide on and even to enshrine in law? Who can alienate ...”

“... that began to spread in March, as local administration buildings came under siege and anti-Kiev ‘self-defence militias’ began to form. Many of these protests were the continuation of an ‘anti-Maidan’ movement that emerged late last year – ostensibly in defence of the Yanukovych government, but reinforced by a more powerful rejection of the Maidan’s ...”

“... Chandler and Hammett fitted well with a postwar generation’s fidgety need to blow holes in the self-sustaining establishment. I think they were part of the equation for the brief explosion of political and social activity. In Tough without a Gun, a biography of Bogart, Stefan Kanfer is concerned that they don’t make screen idols like that any more. He ...”

“... to describe them. Like Kanner he found that these children were characteristically isolated and self-sufficient, their language often bizarre and idiosyncratic, but he also emphasised their unusual talents and abilities. To Asperger these children, unlike the children Kanner described, seemed full of potential: ‘While their language at times did not seem ...”

“... he writes, ‘mirror so clearly the American Dream of Success and the corollary ideal of the Self-Made Man.’ Labor’s bland subtitle, ‘An American Life’, may be meant as a riposte to previous biographers. ‘The greatest story Jack London ever wrote,’ Alfred Kazin said in On Native Grounds, ‘was the story he lived.’ But his afterlife has ...”

“... simply that kind of guy waiting for an opportunity, or catastrophe, in which to develop his true self – bad luck for Mrs Kimble but a great benefit to small-town America. What is never in doubt is Kimble’s innocence. The audience is not asked to wonder about it, or even to worry much about Kimble being caught by Gerard, since that would mean the end of ...”

“... The economy started going wrong in the 1970s – Tom Wolfe’s ‘me decade’. Frivolous and self-regarding, the 1970s were also profoundly grim. It was in this decade that the American (and global) economy embarked on its fateful transformation from industrial to finance-driven capitalism and that the American working class underwent a makeover that ...”

“... heart into the earth, so it would grow. This touch of melodrama is complicated by Glück’s self-awareness about her ‘dark nature’, as in ‘“Parodos”’: I was born to a vocation: to bear witness to the great mysteries. Now that I’ve seen both birth and death, I know to the dark nature these are proofs, not mysteries – Glück likes the ...”

“... social ceremonies and mutual courtesies.’ Dickens’s birth takes the form of his father’s ‘self-consciously genteel announcement’ in the local newspapers. The second specimen, a schoolboy letter apologising for an unreturned Latin book, is an early touchstone for his imaginative life, with its whimsical wordplay and elaborate signature. It ...”

“... said, that can explain why in the last three hundred years or so we in the West have become so self-consciously liberal; liberal about thought itself, the conviction that prompted Nagel’s book, and liberal in our morals and politics. For most of the known human past this hasn’t been so, and we can’t say that our ancestors were benighted or ...”