“... the role, Zoë Wanamaker described Viola as a catalyst who comes into a world that is stuck in self-love, mourning and convention – and makes it change. Starting the play with her arrival emphasises that reading. But it underestimates the reality of Illyria. Beginning with Viola’s question about the place, rather than Orsino’s unquestioning ...”

“... was preoccupied by the need to earn a living for his growing family while persisting with his self-analysis. The year after Anna’s birth his father died and he used the word ‘psychoanalysis’ for the first time in print (in French). These were years of real and necessary self-absorption for Freud. Mrs Freud’s ...”

“... Anthony Lambrianou, the self-confessed author of Inside the Firm: The Untold Story of the Krays’ Reign of Terror, admits that Ronnie Kray did shock him. Just once. An unforgettable occasion. A motor eased alongside Tony at the corner of Blythe Street, Bethnal Green. Ron and Reg were inside, keeping company with a known associate, Dickie Morgan ...”

“... behaviour – cynical, baffled or plain incompetent – of the collection of Oxford graduates and self-made men who sat in its Cabinets. The Party, one might conclude, survived because it gave its poorer supporters just enough, and presented a humanitarian and liberationist face to middle-class campaigners. ‘The Government,’ Ponting points out, ‘had a ...”

“... revealed to be ‘mere machines’. Many others have claimed that we must drastically revise our self-image now that we have realised that we are just Turing machines made out of protoplasm. Dennett’s claim is that, thanks in part to the development of parallel distributed processing, a way of programming computers which ‘blazes the first remotely ...”

“... render belated homage, and I will never forgive myself for this failure.’ The tone is not just self-abasing (‘I quail before de Gaulle. He is the Great Other, the inaccessible absolute’ etc), but self-flagellating. What Debray can’t get over is that for most of his life ‘De Gaulle just made us snigger’: he was ...”

“... of chance encounters with the surviving actors in the drama, who proceed to press upon him their self-justifications and confessions. Anton’s meetings with Mr and Mrs Beumer (who lived in the first house on the left), with Fake Ploeg’s son, with Cor Takes, one of the two Communists who shot Ploeg, and, finally, with Karin Korteweg, Mr Korteweg’s ...”

“... level the story he has to tell is unusually interesting, beginning with that intellectually self-improving father. His parents were assimilated German-speaking Jews, Habsburg subjects before 1919, and thereafter citizens of the new state of Czechoslovakia (where it seemed wise to speak Czech, at least in public). Prague in the interwar years was ...”

“... not entirely unpriggish, since it goes along with a deep hostility to aristocratic leisure and to self-indulgences of all sorts) underpins many of the ethical judgments in the Lives, and indeed runs through the detail of its phrasing. Pope was ‘fretful, and easily displeased, and allowed himself to be capriciously resentful’. That phrase ‘allowed ...”

“... heard a shaheed’s parent say, in private, “I am happy” or even “I am proud.”’ Self-selecting groups who decide what is sacred and what is not are often at odds with the communities from which they’re drawn. Atran has spoken to sources in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Gaza, where Islamist movements enjoy broad support, but he’s only ...”

“... an extravagantly gruesome murder. The Map and the Territory therefore carries out a kind of double self-annihilation: the imagined slaying of the writer called ‘Houellebecq’, and the aesthetic triumph of an artist superficially the opposite of the novelist we’ve come to know. The eerily blank and neutral creations of Jed Martin imply a placid acceptance ...”

“... and places few aristocrats would encounter on their Continental tours. He was chancy, observant, self-assured, kind to horses and rude to people. Hammond was born in Cambridgeshire in 1748 and grew up in a little village called Exning near Newmarket. By the time he was six he had lost his mother and three brothers; his father, penniless and out of ...”

“... flight was, in its way, a tribute to the role she had played in the household and a subconscious self-indictment. Years later he returned, but it was too late. They didn’t need him any more. The boys had been taken in by an aunt and the girl had gone to live with her grandmother. Of the boys, Satyam was cleverer, a dreamer whose discovery of modern Telugu ...”

“... poetry which similarly reveals this gift for being wrapped up in itself: he called it the ‘self-inwoven simile’, and it happened, Empson said, ‘when not being able to think of a comparison fast enough he compares the thing to a vaguer or more abstract notion of itself, or points out that it is its own nature, or that it sustains itself by ...”

“... puts it, ‘21st-century everything’. Everything on the point of collapse.Weather is made up of self-contained paragraphs like the following, which is not just characteristic but paradigmatic of the book’s concerns: ‘Eli [Lizzie’s young son] is at the kitchen table, trying all his markers one by one to see which still work. Ben [her husband] brings ...”