“... more harm than good. Take the notion of a personality that persists through time – an enduring self or soul or spirit that can be loved or hated for its past actions and future projects. It is a ‘fiction’, according to Hume, based on unwarranted associations of ideas; but it is also indispensable to morality, and we might be wise to treat it as if it ...”

“... I stood up alone, feeling safe as I knew Mrs Booth liked me, and enjoying the glamour of the self-righteous. Ridiculous. But also, I thought everyone else was going to own up as well. I really did. Like in Spartacus. ‘It was me,’ ‘It was me.’ But no one stood up. Mrs Booth did praise me for standing up, I remember – I knew she would. But I also ...”

“... the official and the fictional versions, it upends the one-sidedness of Bellow’s furious and self-justifying letters, and offers an account that is never knowingly uncomplicated, sentimental or prejudiced, and never dull when it comes to the business of examining the writer’s inner world. Bellow’s community was his subject and his subject was his ...”

“... a single night’s co-ordinated attacks, IS – a cultish militia perhaps 35,000 strong, ruling a self-declared ‘caliphate’ that no one recognises as a state – achieved something France denied the Algerian FLN until 1999, nearly four decades after independence: acknowledgment that it had been fighting a war, rather than a campaign against ...”

“... that the rules didn’t apply,’ but he doesn’t go here. In Ulysses, Molly Bloom’s euphoric self-affirmation is too lyrical, Gerty MacDowell’s allusions to menstruation too seemly and quaint. McBride has said that her aim is ‘to make language cope with and more fully describe that part of life that is destroyed once it begins to get put into ...”

“... far the most experienced voice in the Leave camp, was that ‘the important issue is democracy and self-government. It is about that principle. Self-government is more important than anything else.’ Lawson or Farage, it comes to the same thing: Nigels against the world. But the voice is the voice of Enoch. Mr Powell, as he ...”

“... called Charlotte. True, however, by the accounts of all historians is the shattering blow to his self-esteem delivered when the Vienna Academy turned down his application to study art. ‘Too few heads. Sample drawing unsatisfactory.’ He had been fanatically certain that he would get in, and the wound of that rejection, perhaps his only solid ...”

“... Robert Creeley align him with Hart Crane and Keats as a poet vulnerable to the world and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic Atlantic cutting at our feet, speaking of Hart Crane and the last words we would have in our mouths at that moment of ...”

“... of seguidillas, to frank discussions of masturbation and some remarkable doodles, including a self-portrait of Goya smoking a cigarette. The two men exchanged drawings of their penises (‘Jesus! What a testimony!’ Goya marvelled on receiving Zapater’s letter). During an illness in 1790, Goya told Zapater that ‘with your portrait before me, it seems ...”

“... order the prerogative courts to release suspected recusants and heretics, and to prevent enforced self-incrimination. It is here that he locates the origin of the courts’ power to review governmental and quasi-judicial invasions of personal liberty, including imprisonment for non-payment of taxes and fines, and it was in this context that chapter 29 of ...”

“... to be in any institution’).Nochlin had the ability to make complicated ideas appear simple and self-evident. She had a knack, too, for getting there first – an underacknowledged skill – and bringing up issues that would later find more complex theoretical formulations in the work of others. Her essay ‘The Imaginary Orient’, published in 1983, was ...”

“... habit of hyperbole. He hasn’t found a voice: he is a person writing out family legends and self-analysis rather than a novelist. Still, we do have the beginning of an answer to the astute question Jean-Yves Tadié asks in his preface to the newly published manuscripts: ‘What was there in these 75 pages that was so good that he would write them, so ...”

“... uplifting conclusion. She had it all worked out: Lovelace, ‘overwhelmed with grief, remorse, and self condemnation’, would fall into a ‘dangerous fever’ and be attended by Clarissa on his deathbed; charitably, she would agree to his dying wish to have their hands joined in marriage; invigorated by the promise of her affections, he would make a full ...”

“... the conventional narrative that is altogether more fascinating, not least in the way it omits any self-congratulation about human achievement. His account of the deep past doesn’t purport to be definitive, but it is surely more accurate than the one we’re used to, and it implicitly exposes the flaws in contemporary political ideas that ultimately rest on ...”

“... wars shows that although these weapons may not provide a decisive edge in combat they excel in self-advertisement, projecting an image of all-seeing omnipotence. Drones induce terror in civilian populations and healthy profits for manufacturers. The spell persists even when they are unarmed. Protesters in Minneapolis on the morning of 29 May, three days ...”