“... judgment; the Wealth of Nations, on the other hand, portrays us as beings motivated largely by self-interest. To generations of scholars this sharp contrast between the sympathetic and the selfish conjured up a hermeneutic abyss. Various strategies were employed to bridge it. Had Smith’s readers confounded prescription with description, a humanistic ...”

“... The heroine must be driven in some way towards the sad end made importantly tragic by a seed of self-destruction planted when she was very young. And indeed, Sonia Orwell was well equipped with potential demons in her youth. Her childhood was a colonial mess. Born in Calcutta, she had a father who died, perhaps by suicide, when she was a few months old, and ...”

“... the reform movement refused to acknowledge the enormous importance of footbinding in the self-image of older Chinese women. For generations, not to have bound feet was to risk unmarriageability and social ostracism. ‘I pity you so, you ignorant women,’ Yan Xishan thundered. ‘Hurry up and get rid of your old bad habits, don’t let my concern ...”

“... Natalie give their work florid, off-putting titles and even worse first lines. Joshua is dour and self-pitying as a writer, while Natalie is self-aggrandising and po-faced. They are at their worst when they talk about their writing, so it’s interesting that Riley chooses to face down criticism by bringing a part of ...”

“... is it yet entirely extinct: well read, there is still in it light enough to exhibit its own self; nay to diffuse a faint authentic twilight some distance round it. Not every item in the Duke-Edinburgh edition seems quite to count as a ‘burning beacon’, but, as this sample of Carlyle’s prose may suggest, the level of sheer verbal force and ...”

“... and desires, but also in their refusal to pass judgment on them, no matter how irrational or self-limiting. They used their own incoherent desires as raw material. In The Hundreds, co-written with Kathleen Stewart, Berlant includes an experiment called ‘This Week in Shakes’ that documented the taste of ‘virtue breakfasts’ – protein shakes of ...”

“... Folly herself utter the speech in praise of folly, producing as he did so various paradoxes of self-reference. Burton, it might be said, in some degree follows the Erasmian lead in that, even as he offers an analysis of melancholy which is so zestful as to sound at times like a celebration, he presents himself as melancholy: Melancholy praising ...”

“... master, two conditions must in turn be satisfied. You must first of all succeed in mastering your self. By this Milton means that you must be able to control your passions and act in accordance with the dictates of reason at all times. If you instead allow yourself, as he puts it at the beginning of The Tenure, to be governed by blind affections, then your ...”

“... of constitutional meaning are as old and as august as the founding itself. And the theoretical self-consciousness Scalia brings to the table is a 20th-century phenomenon. In fact, he often sounds like a comparative literature student c.1983. He says it’s a ‘sad commentary’ that ‘American judges have no intelligible theory of what we do most’ and ...”

“... his life could not be anything more than a compendium of abstract ideas. But the remark was not as self-deprecating as it looks. It was among other things an allusion to John Stuart Mill, who had opened his own very celebrated Autobiography with a similar disclaimer: he had nothing to offer, he said, apart from an account of the origin and growth of his ...”

“... that she lacked not only the ruthlessness needed to make it to the top but also the boundless self-confidence and (for much of her career) the supportive spouse that a woman in a man’s world needs. Peel agrees, but he also rather gently notes her limitations – difficulty prioritising, lack of political nous – as a minister and as a party ...”

“... is the modern American variant of Enlightenment rationalism and progress, a creed not known for self-doubt or failures of nerve. The deeper the trouble, the more we are seen to have lost our way, the further we must go spatially and temporally to find the cultural models that will help us. In the stronger versions of this quest, there is either a place ...”

“... been if he hadn’t had the benefits of an education. When Harrison mentions his poetry, his rival self, a graffiti artist, is scornful: ‘Who needs/yer fucking poufy words. Ah write mi own./Ah’ve got mi work on show all over Leeds.’ And when Harrison speculates that such graffiti are a cri de coeur,the response is contemptuous:So what’s a ...”

“... after Hiroshima – whose political involvements were intense and important to their sense of self. Fermi loved hiking, the outdoor life and manly physical games; he had pub-quiz-winner tendencies about all sorts of scientific things. He insisted on being recognised as the smartest person in any room – the alpha male who discovered the nature of beta ...”

“... the extent of his appetite, the audacity of his opportunism and the oceanic immensity of his self-regard prompt awe – as well as sentences like these, cumulative and insistent, as his own so often were. The title of David Bellos’s book on Les Misérables – The Novel of the Century – immediately tells us we’re in the territory; Hugo is greater ...”