“... his emotional state you feel weighing on you. As a result, all his pictures can be interpreted as self-portraits. Munch by Himself at the Royal Academy (until 11 December) includes pictures which do not show his face, but are entirely relevant to the theme of the exhibition. In the self-portraits which are just that ...”

“... pug physiognomy and Ottoman wardrobe created a comic sensation – abetted by a succession of self-portraits in this guise. Court doors opened readily to welcome the novelty act, and the clients didn’t blink at Liotard’s equally outlandish prices. ‘Self-fashioning’, the cultural historians demurely term ...”

“... the question. They assume, surely correctly, that it is a genuine puzzle. There is nothing either self-explanatory or standard about the survival of a united kingdom based on England, from Early Modern times until practically the end of the second millennium. John Robertson’s collection of academic studies examines the origins of the Union’s most ...”

“... of the early star, with all his sudden and surprising brilliance, and the ruminative, bookish, self-deprecating urbanity of the older man. By his own criteria, this made Auden a ‘major poet’, that is, one who ‘writes differently in youth, in middle age and when old’. The young poet started poems better than anyone since Donne, but how did the poet ...”

“... former is a partial release from temperament, the latter its insistence, despite the motions of self-knowledge, the gestures of retraction. Literary theory announces itself as the new. MacCabe achieves ‘a new way of thinking through the relationships between the social and the individual’; Selden who, though a Senior Lecturer at the University of ...”

“... at getting people to imagine what he might have been if he hadn’t been who he was – it is too self-regarding to be merely disappointed or contemptuous. So when Lycett refers to Thomas as ‘a snivelling wreck’ as he begins to collapse on one of the reckless reading tours of America which eventually killed him, and then qualifies this with ‘– a not ...”

“... them. Misunderstandings between people are funny because they suggest the great vanity of the self. In that Scottish anecdote, two sealed egoisms talk past each other: the master, thinking of himself, asks the servant if he has been tarnishing his reputation; the servant, also thinking of himself, replies with information about his own mental ...”

“... brilliant, somewhat bonkers idea that Earth can be understood as a living organism – a complex, self-regulating system which acts to ensure its own survival. This idea has new resonance in a time of climate crisis, and in Novacene, James Lovelock, the man who proposed the Gaia hypothesis (and who turned a hundred in 2019), has set down some thoughts about ...”

“... a gift,      The poet exhibits here How to be conscious in every direction But that of the self, where deception starts. Not that self-consciousness is necessarily at fault, according to the poem, but it has to be kept in balance, ‘under laws/Of disciplined sensibility’, as in 17th-century Wit. When these ...”

“... insufficiently recognised by the king’s settlement. Disaffected, they drifted into cynicism and self-interest. There were things owing, promised, missing. Liars and opportunists had flourished during the years of upheaval, like the old royalist colonel in the satire ‘Timon’ (probably by Rochester), who brags about his supposed Interregnum ...”

“... simple distinctions between his early and later works: ‘If the late/Writings are about grace and self-loathing/Tick the box’; ‘The late work I find strange/To live with, like derange-/ment’; ‘Not again those marvellous early poems/Lately acknowledged’. He is right to be irritated, since there are at least three loose groups of extremely various ...”

“... heroes, who are often also the narrators of the novels in which they appear, tend to be highly self-conscious art historians, or scientists or academics with high aesthetic ideals and dodgy personal histories, like Victor Maskell, the Anthony Blunt-ish hero of The Untouchable, or the murderer Freddie Montgomery in The Book of Evidence, or the unnamed ...”

“... and its commitment to a ‘bottom-up’ practice centred on personal reflection, narration and ‘self-fashioning’. When the archive relaunched the project in 1981, recruiting volunteer observers to contribute personal diaries and responses to directives, it was this inheritance to which it laid claim. Mass Observation is, as its website puts it, ‘a ...”

“... 20th century had more than its fair share of clever rogues, and no one played the role with more self-conscious élan than Walter Serner, who compiled an aphoristic guide to succeeding as a con artist in a Europe roiled by social upheaval, economic chaos and political intrigue after the First World War. Born in 1889 to an affluent Jewish family in the ...”

“... which for so many male American writers is the most crucial one: the search for the unfettered self.’ The ‘unfettered self’, or rather its expression in paint, was exactly what the makers of Abstract Expressionism in the Forties and Fifties pursued. Robert Motherwell was one of them, and his collected writings ...”