“... on the windswept islands to the north. The sealer communities provided a model of anarchic self-sufficiency. As one observer lamented in 1817, They are complete savages, living in bark huts like the natives, not cultivating anything, but living entirely on kangaroos, emus and small porcupines, and getting spirits and tobacco in barter for the skins ...”

“... of school desegregation as oppressors. In a peculiarly American version of victimology and self-reinvention, they invoked their ancestors’ tales of workplace signs that read ‘No Irish Need Apply,’ and claimed that through hard work and gumption they had risen above oppression while blacks continued to wallow in ...”

“... obliged to tell me, ‘he works all night.’ The very idea of a private life, or even of a ‘self’, with its tendency towards a possessive individualism, was alien to him. He was used to keeping open house to innumerable comrades from across the world who would turn up at short notice, expecting a bed or a floor, a meal and a conversation that went on ...”

“... for the same egoistic reasons we do – jealousy, pain, humiliation and the like. In addition, self-murder was (and still is in some cases) used in many traditional societies to protest against injustice or to shame someone. In India, China, Japan, but also in pre-Christian Europe, people would kill themselves in order to curse someone, to challenge an ...”

“... poets’ is the way one of their friends put it. ‘Proper thanatourists,’ they call themselves, self-deprecatingly, winningly. A combination of de Botton bonhomie and BBC breathlessness suffuses the book, particularly at the beginning, which puts us in the swanky sale room of Bonhams, where an auction is about to take place, and Auden’s manuscript of ...”

“... individualist Brexitists, think that history is the outcome of the efforts of heroic individuals (self-made men like them, free thinkers, the ‘legendary’ Boris), or, if more alt-right fascist than alt-right libertarian, the struggle between races. The collapse of this modern political epistemology and the collective ...”

“... bars of soap. A directive and an assignment. The reading, stuck between tawdry and kooky, pulp and self-help. ‘Ramon George’ and ‘Right Guard’. ‘Deodorant’ – that must mean God-given – and ‘Sneyd’ – if not the mis-written ‘Sneya’ that bedevils the fellow’s hapless Canadian passport. The weird, badly wearing (not so much ‘quite ...”

“... it is an instant trigger of distant infancy. I am sharply returned to the 1950s, to my child self. I am once again, for a fugitive moment, a New Elizabethan. This hue, which works on the colour receptor in my brain, is impervious to simulation. It is unknown both to Pantone (though it isn’t that far from 18-4537) and to the British Colour Council’s ...”

“... this was hell,’ Jack says of his life, ‘no flames at all, just an eternity of disheartened self-awareness.’ He is a ‘naked man’ who also calls himself ‘the Prince of Darkness’; he may be spiritually dead, or spiritually not yet born; he is Adam in a world that has ended, instead of a world that is yet to begin. Jack is happy to describe his ...”

“... scroungers who made piles of cash out of trivial or imaginary injuries, whingers who turned their self-regarding grievances into human rights claims, and legislators and lawyers who enabled and encouraged them to do it. These have become our folk-devils.Enter, ex machina, the Secret Barrister (hereafter ‘SB’ and assumed for grammatical and syntactical ...”

“... According to Fénéon, Degas painted his nudes crouching in tubs as if their bodies were self-generated. Often posed with their backs towards us and sometimes cropped by the frame, these women also ‘externalise the viewer’, which heightens our sense of autonomy. (Michael Fried would call this ‘absorption’, while Freud might see it as ...”

“... often featured her young sons, Hans and Peter, in her pictures of proletarian families. Searching self-portraits – Kollwitz produced more than a hundred in all media – also punctuate her oeuvre, which is meticulously surveyed in the current retrospective at MoMA (until 20 July). Largely self-taught as a ...”

“... world and this gives him an appealing sheen of defiance. Leaving the community for stints of self-exploration seems to be reserved for men. The third-person narration remains tethered to Ruth, who looks aslant at the daily happenings on the Dorf: two sisters ladle mulled wine from a stockpot ‘in syncopation’; a class of children unearth an ...”

“... alone cannot account for his eminence, however. Crumb is both an observant satirist and a self-aware student of his own drives. His grasp of American vernacular and his sardonic humour suggest a comparison with Mark Twain as well as with Twain’s admirer, the proudly prejudiced social critic H.L. Mencken. Rambunctious and often offensive, Crumb draws ...”

“... job’ at all, let alone have to add ‘money’, as if ‘economic’ was unclear. Note, too, the self-pity (‘staff hurts’ and ‘hard ones’) and concomitant self-glorification: para 4 is supposed to have ‘you’ as the subject but by 4(c) this has irresistibly been turned around. Nixon, it seems, felt good telling ...”