“... court social worker had told the prison escort service about William’s recent history of self-harm, so he was monitored during the journey from Glasgow to Polmont. When he arrived he was placed on Talk to Me (TTM), a scheme for prisoners deemed at risk of suicide. Those perceived to be at highest risk should be assigned a ‘Safer Cell’ and checked ...”

“... into periods of devastating flatness, alternating between grandiosity and lifeless reclusion. Such self-isolation need not mean total inactivity; both men became perhaps too used to the unnatural bubble of the modern recording studio. It was where they came alive, and could conjure unearthly realms. But when the work was done, the real world had to be faced ...”

“... wasn’t just American, but freakishly American, and like any good scout was both pathologically self-assured and incurably naive. David Foster Wallace said that he spoke like ‘Jimmy Stewart on acid’ (though Lynch’s addictions were the diner-appropriate kind: coffee, sugar, cigarettes). Whatever the contradiction – mainstream ...”

“... sonnet 129, and says he takes ‘a single-minded expository view of the poem, as though it were a self-consistent sermon’. For Vendler, the verbal imagination’s true intent is ‘always to make a chain of interesting signifiers, with the ‘message’ tucked in as best the poet can’. And she says that because many readers prefer to think of the Sonnets ...”

“... There is something in the nature of the place, a residue of royalty and privilege and congenital self-satisfaction: the old dockside dowager has painted herself up for the punters, while revising her lurid past in amnesiac tourist brochures. Clap sores revamped as beauty spots. PR operatives delight in being both economical and spendthrift with the ...”

“... as their murderers could manage to lay their hands on. Thereafter Bassani has the tact and self-confidence to say little more of the fate that awaits his people, though we are later shown the various ways in which the malice and greed of some of the locals, and the fear felt by others, combine bit by bit to isolate the city’s Jews from their former ...”

“... or reveals itself as, convention. It measures the distance between the dreams of a younger self and the betrayals of adulthood, with its new dreams – some vibrant, some pallid. The black comedy of The Group comes from the characters’ lack of self-awareness, their bad judgment, their blind hypocrisy. Honest ...”

“... with cerebral palsy, also deceased, and he takes Jude to the doctor after one of his episodes of self-harm. The group’s rich kid is Malcolm, the biracial son of an African-American banker and his white writer wife. He has a bottom-feeder job at a fancy architecture firm, is anxious about being insufficiently black, unsure of his sexuality and creatively ...”

“... Michaels documents in her fascinating book, is that the Lamaze craze, so redolent of American self-determinism, originated in mind-control techniques developed in the Soviet Union. Ivan Pavlov’s discovery of the conditioned reflex earned him a Nobel Prize in 1904. In the following decades, Soviet doctors used the idea to train women to relax during ...”

“... hard(er) and follow our dreams, be ourselves and never give up; thus Disraeli became a model of self-empowerment. Daisy Hay makes it clear that Disraeli’s wife, Mary Anne, was in some ways even more of an interloper than Disraeli, whose family wealth and connections (his father, Isaac, was a successful littérateur) are often underplayed. Of ...”

“... in its revealed truths. Theory can be good for historians, and few of us practise the perfectly self-abnegating primary research prescribed by Geoffrey Elton. We need something larger to help us move from the specific to the general, and towards some approximation of meaning. Acton presents his task reasonably, challenging readers to use classical ...”

“... had just been passed over for two extremely rare professorships in his field.’ His own titanic self-confidence notwithstanding, who was going to back a scientist whose most creative years were probably behind him? Certainly not the bean counters who underwrote the risks of expensive laboratory research in imperial St Petersburg. Pavlov had made the best of ...”

“... the population. Frustrated by the opposition-controlled National Assembly, he made aggressive and self-defeating moves against it, going so far as to decree its dissolution in 2017 – though, as we can see, it has continued to function. But it’s also true that, economically, any Venezuelan leader would have been weakened by the slump in global oil prices ...”

“... palette and weak, overwrought compositions. In Promenade, Chagall depicts himself grinning self-consciously and made-up. He was by most accounts very vain; who else would make a painting such as The Poet Reclining (at Tate Modern, though not in Bilbao) on their honeymoon – an admiring self-portrait with no Bella in ...”

“... uncertainties. These are captured in what might be called the poem’s burlesque of ethnography: a self-imposed task which is also a game, in which an interest in culture both demands and serves as a pretext for continued detachment. Starting out as a city poet of Boston and Brooklyn, Mlinko has since become a poet of seemingly perpetual itinerancy. She began ...”