“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... declared purpose, his love overwhelms these people with words and will not let them breathe. The self-depreciating asides (on a middle-class writer’s privilege and complicity) are only a little dated and anyway in line with expectations of this form of pastoral, but they sink the subject in a different way. So does a ...”

“... witch-hunting glee and life-devouring incomprehension had made the country swoon with piety and self-righteousness. Some years later, when the boys’ case was brought before the European Court of Human Rights, the judges expressed themselves baffled by the trial, its rapidity, carelessness and showiness; it was, they said, a trial which risked ...”

“... its use of apartheid, its provocations at Al-Aqsa Mosque, its continuing denial of Palestinian self-determination – might have led to the furies of 7 October. Instead, they insist that they are once again the victims of antisemitism, of ‘Amalek’, the enemy nation of the Israelites. That Israelis cannot see, or refuse to see, their own responsibility ...”

“... a poet. People who defined a new movement in their time.’The New York Times ended a few days of self-suppression with a summation of the Trump lobby’s atmospherics. ‘For Donald J. Trump’s most ardent supporters,’ it said,the assassination attempt on Saturday was the climax and confirmation of a story that Mr Trump has been telling for years. It is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the American soil of the book’s themes or subject matter: multicultural brotherhood, immigrant self-fashioning in the New World, post-9/11 New York. This compact novel, in which an emotionally buttoned-down new arrival recounts the downfall of another recent transplant who is, by contrast with him, an extravagant dreamer, has won admiring comparisons to ...”

“... the moment you’re being told about it.’ Glass then delivers his version of the origins of the self, a curious mixture of Rousseau, evolutionary biology and rugged individualism: Back then, we all used to hang out together all day long doing the same thing. We lived in packs. So there was no need for language. If there was a leopard coming, there was no ...”

“... understand the meaning of this rock; besides, what is this feeling of calm based on – on health, self-assurance, individual personality? I: on the emphasis on God. He (immediately changing his tone): well, that’s a different matter. Prokofiev now not only embraced ‘the new simplicity’ but also showed complete readiness to use Soviet subject matter and ...”