“... this vexatious flatulence, and therefore have troublesome nights.’ Johnson had his fair share of self-pity, though more on matters mental than physical. Self-pity has had a bad press lately, but someone who has no sorrow for themselves will hardly have pity on others. Johnson’s capacity to feel for himself can readily be ...”

“... flows unstaunchably. Though we repress this trauma, it persists within us as the hard core of the self. Something is missing inside us which makes us what we are, a muteness which resists being signified but which shows up negatively as the outer limit of our discourse, the point at which our representations crumble and fail. Lacan’s infamous ...”

“... the possibility of a ‘moral utopia’. While there was irony in the comment, he valued it as a self-reliant, resourceful and mutually supportive society, distant from the places of power and below the notice of official imagination. After he died, a book called Island Stories appeared, collated from his letters and articles, notes and fragments. It’s the ...”

“... over a plain blue dress and black socks. The socks, in particular, would have appalled her younger self. What was Nella wearing when she met Dr Elmer S. Imes, the man who would become her husband? I wish I knew. It was the summer of 1918. Larsen had worked at Lincoln Hospital throughout the Spanish flu epidemic, protected only by a gauze mask. Elmer was eight ...”

“... honest to yourself about yourself is good for you – which is I suppose what all narratives about self-realisation must be about. By contrast The Magician, which is not about coming out but about staying firmly in, occupies a much more complicated and neurotic world, in which Mann’s negation of his homosexual feelings is admittedly a kind of moral failure ...”

“... to appear in Blast. Lewis thought that people had had enough of all that. They did not want self-effacement. They wanted brilliant fellows like him performing stunts and letting off fireworks. ‘What’s the good of being an author if you don’t get any fun out of it?’ Ford told this story several times in several different ways, each time effacing ...”

“... delighting in bards and ballads, was happy, repeatedly, to style himself a ‘bard’, as well as, self-deprecatingly, ‘a bardie’ and, with mock immodesty, ‘my bardship’. By this time bards were everywhere – in England too. Thomas Gray, a Cambridge don, wrote ‘The Bard’; William Collins, in London, hankered after the ‘Old Runic bards’ of the ...”

“... the same for Republika Srbija. This is more than just an anecdote. Ivory Coast is at once a very self-enclosed place and the most pan-African country on a continent where the political dream of integration remains elusive. Houphouët-Boigny wasn’t a dreamer in the mould of Kwame Nkrumah or Sékou Touré, two of his radical pan-African neighbours. A ...”

“... claims. So if I’m convinced that I played my coming-out scene to my mother in a key of sickly self-pity, then the reality was surely worse. Did I compare my sexual orientation with her own road accident a few years earlier, as something that had to be dealt with in all its damage rather than wished away? I’m afraid I did. As the years went by she must ...”

“... Frenchmen, men of ‘absolute normality’. The typical Houellebecq hero is a bored, alienated, self-pitying man who is losing his place in society, at work and, worst of all, in the bedroom. In a ruthless, zero-sum sexual marketplace, he loses out to men who are more powerful or more virile. Houellebecq is notorious for his pornographic depictions of sex ...”

“... to leave behind: murder, intoxication, libertinage, art and revolution are sublime forms of self-expression. At the head of this parade is the rogue poet François Villon, imprisoned in the Châtelet in 1462; on the last float, the heroines from Jacques Rivette’s 1981 movie, Le Pont du Nord, are waving goodbye, along with the two keynote ...”

“... discarded – and so should the assorted defeats and dead ends derived from it. This year’s The Self Awakened tries to help the left further down the road, and no doubt Free Trade Reimagined, due soon, will be another phase of his unstoppable campaign. Unger speaks primarily about the left and what it should do, but the old right finds itself in a ...”

“... the examination itself and they persisted long after examinations were over, my social and class self-consciousness not entirely shed until long after my education proper was finished. December 1951 was sunny but bitterly cold and though there was no snow the Cam was frozen and the lawns and quadrangles white with frost; coming to it from the soot and grime ...”

“... functions of nothing but custom and superstition and the ovine docility of a populace that lets self-appointed language authorities boss them around. Unmoved by the cavils of the likes of Steven Pinker, who claims that usage rules ‘survive by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations’, Wallace is aghast at the state of American ...”

“... by periods of falling out and kissing and making up with England, episodes in which national self-interest was always prominent, whether in James’s opportunistic support for Perkin Warbeck against Henry VII in the 1490s or his acquisition of Margaret as Queen in the 1500s. In the run-up to Flodden, James lodged his claim to the English throne should ...”