“... and worse in the emptinesses of land or sea: it smacks too much of masochism, exhibitionism or self-indulgence, and none of us likes to be caught out in any of these. Of her own wandering for several months across the Outback of her native Australia, Robyn Davidson says: ‘The lunatic idea was, basically, to get myself the requisite number of wild camels ...”

“... changing the church’s approach to social issues; conservatives tend to see it as a sad loss of self-confidence, degrading a rich and beautiful tradition and setting the church adrift. Mixed positions, which combine progressive social views with affection for traditional forms (or vice versa), are much rarer than they are in the Church of England.Francis at ...”

“... was worth and how many pennies he ought to get. This practicality saved him from the seductive self-indulgence of extremism. ‘That extremism in general stands for purity and courage is a species of self-delusion practised by the ego on itself a’ for its glory. Division has been Scotland’s arch-fiend and has always ...”

“... life and runs away with what there is of it. She was a great aristocratic beauty; her vanity and self-absorption were monumental; and she smothered her sons with the kind of love that has to be instantly and demonstratively returned with knobs on. When her eldest son was killed in the First World War, she turned to Spiritualism. She was horrid to her ...”

“... in Sam Johnson’s verse: ‘the lexicographer’s weighing of the epithet’. And of course the self-educated rector of Winterbourne Came, author of A Philological Grammar and An Anglo-Saxon Delectus, was himself a lexicographer, as his sort of philologist has to be. However, this poem, ‘Moss’, is from Poems Partly of Rural Life in National English ...”

“... and rhetorical skill; he was also the model for Milton’s belief that to be a poet required self-restraint and, above all, chastity (the young Virgil was known as Parthenias or ‘virgin’).McDowell discusses Milton’s early education, especially the influence of his teachers – first Young, then Alexander Gil (father and son) at St Paul’s, then ...”

“... we want to take certain lives and kinds of art – and how we take them seriously without self-referencing the life out of them, without deadening the very things that constitute their once bright, now frazzled eros and ethos. One of the big differences between Bowie’s heyday in the 1970s and now is that today you can choose from a huge selection of ...”

“... the story told again, without this subject crouched in the midst of it all: the hangnail self adopted for a while, and then discarded. There must be songs for this, and minerals the body takes for granted, shifts and pulls that might have wandered elsewhere, were they not so battened down; and, even if nothing comes, as we disembark to goods and ...”

“... in the know. We didn’t expect ‘thistle seed’ to be thistle seed but we did expect to feel self-satisfied, maybe even smug. It wasn’t meant to be at all like this when we stared into the ...”

“... see me as theproject I am for this planet, earth, the one who needs work, accursed, material, my self, myone singular war memorial, my own native land, temporary, what shall I search for in thecity of searches, part of the circuitry in here with you, animated, these are not actualwords, they come out as integers you track, where are the crumbs, where are the ...”

“... and takes the shaman route of older beliefs. Once, in a train derailment, I bore my sense of self so lightly it yearned for those middle heights. Probably, when dying, we rise above and see nurses acting in perfect democracy. We’ll not romanticise shamans; but whatever our job or class there can always be some dream train where we’re squashed in by ...”

“... their love is pure, as pure as I’d wish the daughter-love to be in a Britain from which I’m self-exiled. This is the night of the eclipse: by 12.30 a thumb print blurs half the moon, and something restless and unachieved follows me through sleep. The roar of the garbage truck wakes me up and releases through my window screen the ill smell of the weekend ...”

“... to branch as the boat slides past, but silent, like a person who has learned to do without the self as worthy foe, settling, instead, for something in the night that tracks him from afar, some faint device unspooling in an empty Nissen hut, the data insufficient to predict a future he could happily imagine, no universal constant, no dark matter, only a ...”

“... personal wholeness? a congerie of chemical elements? of truths held self-             evident? – how do I see them? – to be alive,             is it             to be             faithful? to be an arch, a list, a suddenly right ...”