“... other vigilantes (while remaining strictly neutral in labour disputes), and above all to encourage self-help by devolving the day-to-day running of the camps onto committees of campers elected by the migrants themselves. According to Shindo, however, both the democracy and the respect for the migrants’ dignity were a sham: the managers always had the last ...”

“... next to people who had gone to convent school and Rada, nice people but different, loosely self-conscious and super-educated and social in a way the Northerners had never seen. I met Alan Sillitoe in the 1990s, and he was still shy, still standing at the edge of the party. But it was Storey who most powerfully understood the price of the journey, the ...”

“... by Palestinians outside the territories, just as they were slow to recognise how independent and self-reliant the population of ‘endurers’ had become in the process of creating a civil society – including schools, universities, hospitals, sports teams and theatres –under occupation. Subtly, Shehadeh admonishes the Diaspora for its continuing failure ...”

“... lost his father’s religious framework as a young man but read avidly in theology, philosophy and self-improving literature, searching for another set of values to shape his existence. He found one in the duty of work – for its own sake, but also in order to understand the underlying order of the world and ‘discern its harmonies’, as he put it in a ...”

“... In those files, as I found from my own Polish dossier, it’s not only a younger half-forgotten self that you meet. It is also an unrecognisable stranger – yourself, as others have seen you. For nearly thirty years, hundreds of thousands of people have been reading their secret police files, the records of surveillance, denunciation and manipulation ...”

“... special operators from the War on Terror years have specialised in a different genre: the business self-help manual. These former military officers feel that a career spent planning deadly missions and leading men into messy wars makes them uniquely qualified to offer ‘Battle-Tested Strategies for Creating Successful Organisations and Inspiring Extraordinary ...”

“... tone usually adopted by studies of media institutions and mergers and tycoons, it has a seam of self-deprecation running through it, which reminds you intermittently that Panorama has been an enterprise with important strengths and weaknesses, and that these have something to tell us about the broader journalistic culture and society that produced it. In a ...”

“... is a protean idea of a person, rather confused, rather desperate, but complete in his devotion to self-authorship. His every move shows him to be a modern conundrum about race and identity and selfhood. He might make us laugh, but he might also frighten us into recognising the excesses we demand of those we choose to entertain us. For my money he also ...”

“... to think that all these hours, when my days are full of vigour and my hands and soul craving for self-expression, I am bound, chained to this fiendish mangling-machine, without . . . hope of deliverance . . . I despair of ever writing excellent poetry. I can’t look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do. My mind is so cramped and dulled ...”

“... time of the month’. Like so many products aimed at women, from deodorants to diets to self-help books, the tampon business helps to create the very anxieties it claims to allay. Where else do women get the idea that menstrual odour is something they need to be vigilant about? Certainly not from having smelled it on other women. Considering what a ...”

“... unexpectedly three years ago, before the editing of the second volume was complete, so maybe this self-indulgence was never intended for public consumption. Perhaps, too, some of the more extreme statements in the second volume about the dissolution of that societal glue were similarly not supposed to see the light of day. I doubt it, though. ...”

“... story ‘Flight’); he was supposed to be the one who got to go everywhere. In his 1988 memoir Self-Consciousness (a sort of pre-emptive strike against biographers that Begley both exploits and shows to be evasive), he calls Nancy Nora: It was courtesy of Nora that I discovered breasts are not glazed bouffant orbs pushing up out of a prom dress but soft ...”

“... in. People come along as a first step in the effort to start uncovering and developing their own self-relations and their relations to the world. ‘Very often a desire to write is a desire to live more honestly through language … The notion of “finding your voice”, simplistic as it may sound, is … a social goal.’ Thus, presumably, the genesis of ...”

“... Göring and captivated Shaw. Often she seems to be providing a textbook example of confession as self-exoneration. Negri had been accused by many people of doing many unpalatable things. She had to prove that she had truly loved Valentino and not betrayed his memory; that she hadn’t abandoned her native Poland; that she had never been Hitler’s mistress ...”

“... If you were​ throwing a pity party among American playwrights, the antisocial, alcoholic, self-dramatising misery named Eugene Gladstone O’Neill would win the door prize. At the age of 21, already making a myth of his sense of doom, O’Neill was calling himself ‘the Irish luck kid’. By then, he’d been thrown out of Princeton (‘Ego’ was his nickname), fathered a son with his divorced first wife, caught syphilis in his wanderlust around South America as a merchant seaman, and attempted suicide in a Greenwich Village fleabag called ‘the Hell Hole’ by its permanently pie-eyed denizens ...”