“... would come to know, over the next few months as ‘the fascination’. That sounds melodramatic, self-indulgent, but it was the word that came to mind then and as time went by it seemed more accurate than anything else. Somewhere, at the core of this terrifying paralysis and helplessness, there was a fascination, a taste, not of death, exactly, but of ...”

“... the living usually fail to understand or act on it. Perhaps the uncanniest spectre is the one that self-haunts. In ‘The Jolly Corner’ Henry James has his protagonist, Spencer Brydon, return after a long absence from his American home, only to confront his unlived self: ‘He’s none of me, even as I might have ...”

“... more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners.After the 2013 coup, the Egyptian military, under the self-proclaimed president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, started demolishing the tunnels that led to Egypt, effectively joining Israel’s blockade. Tunnelling was therefore redirected towards the border zone with Israel. In 2014, two separate groups of Palestinian ...”

“... mantle has stayed on, but Stoppard dramatised the idea of facing off an authentic and an assumed self towards the end of Leopoldstadt, when two young men face each other for the first time since Kristallnacht: one is ‘a writer of funny books’ who was taken to England as a child; the other is a mathematician whose family stayed in Vienna. For one, being ...”

“... sort of thing, intoning against ‘the dialogue of the mind with itself’. But Clough saw that self-dialogue could be a cure as well as a disease, or at least a way of being less dutiful towards your discontentments. Throughout the poems you can sense the secret glee of the pious schoolboy who once confessed in his diary: ‘Feel almost inclined to sin ...”

“... too stupidly obvious and so on). That adjustment needs to happen in a secret space, with the ego, self-loving or self-hating, tied up safely elsewhere. Trying to write like a Genius, any writer might feel an awful fraud. Howland’s thwarted career is our loss: at her best she is very good. Most of the stories in the first ...”

“... just one drink’. This is something deeper than romantic longing; it’s tangled up with Ames’s self-conception: Reese ‘had taught him to be a woman … or he’d learned to be a woman with her. She had found him in a plastic state of early development, a second puberty, and she’d moulded him to her tastes.’ Although he has detransitioned, he still ...”

“... of copious draughts of wine and tea so as to investigate the resulting sweats. Such bodily self-management was what the natural philosophy of the day demanded: compare the Venetian physiologist Sanctorius sitting daily in his self-devised ‘weighing chair’ while measuring his own excreta, or Newton poking a needle ...”

“... the major themes in the fiction of Richard Ford. What engages him is the churning of the conscious self, as changeable as the weather on an iffy day. What kind of a day is such a day? Soft or threatening? What kind of people were Ford’s mother and father, whose inner lives might offer strong clues to the meaning of the author’s own? That question has been ...”

“... NGOs, local public and private sector institutions and those (not many) who are successfully self-employed, usually merchants. People try to help one another, but charity isn’t the simple, unencumbered act it once was. A friend from a prominent Gaza family described his dilemma: ‘After paying my taxes to Hamas, the new fees that spring up all the ...”

“... to canonisation, eventually granted by Pope Alexander III in 1161. There was a strong element of self-interest in the process, designed to promote the status of Westminster Abbey, Edward’s foundation and burial place, but there is more to be said about the speed and means by which the Edward of recent history ‘faded into the image of a saint’.The real ...”

“... of the moment by retreating into a monkish solitude, or searching for authenticity in the self-mythologising self-care movement. Emira does both. She longs to work with her hands, as her family does: her dad is a beekeeper, her mum binds books, her little brother is an award-winning barista and her sister is a ...”

“... entrepreneur: manically energetic, pushing, perfectionist. He could occasionally be amusingly self-deprecating, or flamboyantly generous to staff, but only within the bounds of an imperious egotism. No one doubted that he was ‘The Chief’. He stimulated competition within his empire in the hope of making a product good enough to destroy all rivals ...”

“... to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression’. Exasperated and increasingly poor, he puts aside his current project, a novel based on Barthes’s S/Z, and writes a pseudonymous parody of a recent hit, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. He initially calls the book My Pafology and later renames it ...”

“... crossings, Phillips travelled almost all the way along the western side of the border, and, as a self-described ‘passionate believer in the individual freedoms that the Eastern Bloc so systematically deprioritised’, his point of view is essentially a Western one. When he crosses over into what was Czechoslovakia and East Germany, for instance, he feels a ...”