“... fixed in front of the sink and beneath the stairs. The session begins. As in this year’s Self-Portrait (pencil, acrylic, graphite, crayon and Indian ink), the painter narrows his eyes and lifts his chin and grimaces, like Edgar in King Lear, spotting choughs from the clifftop. Usually we talk for the first hour. Then, after a five-second break, he ...”

“... on DonorsChoose.org – as anyone with a credit card can do – I buy things for my younger self, usually books I know she’ll enjoy: The Giver, The Westing Game. For a special treat, I join other donors to pay for a trip to the Smithsonian. Sometimes I buy things she won’t really appreciate, but might later: chemistry study guides, The Omnivore’s ...”

“... collaborations,gaining or losing significant traits, an endlessly augmenting dish?My single self sickens, understanding itselfas slave to DNA – all the blood-flesh agonies of loveto end as a husk on your knees as I’m now on my knees –something about how the crickets contract in death, and the heat,and my own lack of volition, desire and its ...”

“... by their inane and obedient pecking that the behaviourist view of things didn’t have any need of self-consciousness to explain how it is we learn to do what we do. So are parrots in a different case? Have we underestimated them in supposing that, far from having cognitive abilities of their own, they were to be admired for nothing more than mindlessly ...”

“... in for Iris’s linguistic disorientation, her face refracted in a window-pane for her fragmented self. But the effect of such scenes, in the end, is to point up film’s difficulty in rendering a life ‘lived in the mind’. That doesn’t stop it trying. Roles drawn from life in which artistic genius is crossed with profound illness are thought especially ...”

“... scientist, intrigued by the general’s stake in his own myth-making as a means of empowerment and self-justification. In his new biography, Jonathan Fenby delivers the infant Charles into an era of anxiety, brought on by the growing strength of Germany and the sense that France had lost its way. The year was 1890; the smart of the Franco-Prussian War was ...”

“... with the droppings of generations of vultures, makes my great-uncle’s voice speed up and a self-consciously practical, unemotional man turn lyrical, like a mannered Victorian poet, even though, as he admits, he was recounting the memory of a memory. ‘For long enough,’ he says, ‘I used to smell again in memory the reek of the dead feline, and ...”

“... sculpted my life like a statue made of matter that’s foreign to my being. Having employed my self-awareness in such a purely artistic way, and having become so completely external to myself, I sometimes no longer recognise myself. Who am I behind this unreality? I don’t know. I must be someone.’In 1907, aged nineteen, Pessoa wrote some brief ...”

“... Millgate, his scholarly biographer, has not shown how Hardy tailored circumstances to fit his own self-image. There is a danger that all the textual paraphernalia will obscure the real interest and importance of the book. The Life moulds a version of Hardy’s career which emphasises his successful upward-mobility by disguising his family’s working-class ...”

“... they are ideas, so to speak, without ties to anything material, which might serve as a deterrent. Self-persuaded, they need no persuasion. As incarnate ideas, they have lost the power of thought, which may seem paradoxical till you reflect on it. These ordinary men, including fathers of families, have turned into syllogisms, and a syllogism cannot think but ...”

“... to our historical existence.’ This want, of course, if fully indulged, would lead poetry into self-deception – hence the countervailing presence of Prospero, whose covenant is with ‘truth’ rather than ‘beauty’ – ‘and a poet cannot bring us any truth without introducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, the disorderly, the ...”

“... Say what you will about Netanyahu’s predecessors, they had their fascination, from the monastic self-discipline of David Ben-Gurion to the gluttony of Ariel Sharon. Netanyahu comes across as a hollow figure: a ‘marketing man’, in the words of Max Hastings, who met him while writing a biography of his brother Jonathan. Yet Netanyahu can hardly be ...”

“... as containing ‘hundreds of selves’, and often went by different names depending on which self was on top: ‘Katherine Mansfield’, her usual favourite, jostled for prominence with Käthe Schönfeld, Matilda Berry, Elizabeth Stanley, Julian Mark, Mrs K. Bendall, Kass, Katharina, Katoushka and Kissienka. The stories she told about herself often ...”

“... reappropriated. But the circumstances were now different. The Jewish cultural presence evinced a self-confidence, an institutional weight and a recognised legitimacy that permitted both the Jewish and the universal importance of the genocidal experience to be more aggressively affirmed. This was assisted by a recession of anti-semitism in the West, driven ...”

“... image of late Georgian psychiatry is not Tuke sipping tea with his patients in an institution self-consciously designed and run like a large country house, but the imperious keeper able to reduce the ranting and raving to docility and obedience through the moral force of his gaze. Perhaps the most dramatic example of the use of this technique came to ...”