“... stands for something else, especially when the relationship between symbol and referent is merely self-evident, or portentous in the murkiest of ways. The symbol has often defined that which is of great importance but a bit ineffable, or that which is so readily apparent as to seem trite. It was important in the development of psychoanalysis. Jung was ...”

“... or was he, as Arthur Danto puts it, ‘overproductive, repetitive and shallow’? Naive, or a self-consciously calculating opportunist? The canny ‘manager of his own fairyland’ (Jean Cassou), or a painter who carefully cultivated his image as a ‘loveable, fantastical Jewish genius from Vitebsk’ (Clement Greenberg)? Crypto Christian or too ...”

“... by all accounts a charismatic figure, but in the 1970s, at the height of his messianic Maoism, his self-belief had begun to evaporate. His life hadn’t quite worked out the way he might once have hoped, and in what turned out to be his final years he backed away from almost every position he had formerly held, even rewriting his early and most difficult ...”

“... Janice is as happy as a sandgirl, wrapped up warm inside the cosy paradise of pre-school domestic self-sufficiency. There’s a wireless to sing along to; there are butter-and-sugar sandwiches; at night, once the settee is folded out, Beth is ‘hemmed in’, stuck comfortingly in what the anxious little girl thinks of as ‘this wonderful little rat-cage of ...”

“... Alboufaki is the mount of Carathis, Vathek’s malignant enchantress mother, and a kind of self-portrait of Beckford himself, Landry suggests, with his ‘desire for solitude, and his nose for the pestilential and the ghastly’. Beckford, she says, gives us a ‘monstrous camel as also a type of the self . . . as ...”

“... in English, Munthe’s fourth language (after Swedish, French and Italian), makes its casual self-assurance all the more impressive. Stories often give way to – or give rise to – opinionated disquisitions on one or another of Munthe’s pet subjects. He was fascinated by death and dying, and was such a fervent believer in euthanasia – when a doctor ...”

“... were other ways of checking. Some discreet inquiries revealed that the Mugabe supporter and ‘self-styled emissary of Beelzebub’, as one British judge described him, Nicholas van Hoogstraten, had left the country on election night. One had to assume he knew something. I drove along Churchill Avenue, past Normandy and Arundel Roads and Dunkirk Drive ...”

“... and, in a special position of repute and influence, the Manchester Guardian, yielded nothing in self-esteem to the London papers, although most of them had a guilty secret: they were supported by evening papers whose essential function was to provide the racing results. That was true not least of the austere Guardian, subsidised by the Manchester Evening ...”

“... advancement’. Sometimes even at the expense of his fellow officers: his famous – and much self-publicised – ‘great escape’ from the Boers in Pretoria in December 1899 left two comrades behind, fuming. He was quite brazen about this, which earned him little love among his fellow soldiers, or among his (very) senior officers, especially when – a ...”

“... Instead, it led to Britain as it is today, a society obsessed with the idea of personal self-realisation, more liberal in sexual matters, less monocultural and less class-bound, more insecure and more unequal. Thatcher’s policies were not the only factors in this transformation: the decline of traditional industries, a by-product of ...”

“... a period when British society in general and London society in particular was undergoing great and self-conscious change. Intellectual categories, social classes and character types were seen to be shifting as the inhabitants of an expanding capital at the heart of an expanding empire found themselves thrown together in new and odd configurations. The ...”

“... bottom of Diana’s eyes. Odder still, the kohl was sometimes blue. To Elsie, this was a form of self-mutilation: Diana might as well have taken crayons and scribbled all over herself. ‘Why must she do it?’ Elsie would ask, with genuine puzzlement. My grandmother was born in 1908, two years after Madeleine Carroll, the blonde star of The 39 Steps, whom ...”

“... perfectly catches Borges’s quickness, grace, learning and love of precision. It has a touch of self-deprecation too. It wasn’t as if he didn’t like the word ‘gold’ – a 1972 volume of verse is called The Gold of the Tigers – or as if he hadn’t tried plenty of verbal alchemy of his own. But a long attempt is quite different from an ...”

“... In almost every case, most of its members were doubtful that the territory was ‘ready for self-government’. They didn’t demur at the language in which witnesses spoke of the natives being ‘childish’, ‘fickle’, ‘impressionable’, ‘incapable of sustained effort’. This was especially true of Category C territories, such as New ...”

“... to pay homage to the transitive, the flight, the great soup of being in which we actually live.’ Self-expression,​ desire, a get-out-of-jail-free card to protect against ‘bad consequences’: it isn’t hard to see how resonances particular to Maggie and Harry’s situation might outlive the fears Nelson suffered in her work about her aunt Jane. But ...”