“... upper emotional register. Despite every opportunity of scene and action, it never does. He is too self-aware, or perhaps too fastidious, to abandon himself to a coloratura line. Instead, he chills Asya’s character to the point where he as narrator can safely handle it: ‘When in later life people said she was cold, she never disagreed. For she knew, and ...”

“... biology is pervaded by Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the significance of that theory for our self-understanding remains largely unassimilated. It isn’t just that evolution contradicts the Biblical story of the creation – which the Roman Catholic Church and most Protestant denominations don’t take literally any more. Darwin’s theory, as usually ...”

“... the byways of Modernism, autobiography is beginning to be widely used as a deliberately uncertain, self-exploratory form. Record and narrative are not renounced, but their threads are loose, within a different intended effect. The difference from fiction of the same apparent kind is, however, still crucial. Always, within the autobiographical form, a figure ...”

“... throughout historical variation is the construction of body, as something apart from the true self (whether conceived as soul, mind, spirit, will, creativity, freedom ...) and as undermining the best efforts of that self. That which is not body is the highest, the best, the noblest, the closest to God.’ In ...”

“... reached its inevitable flowering in national independence. Early in this century, Bancroft’s self-congratulatory narrative came under attack from two sources. The ‘Progressive’ historians saw the struggle for independence as a social movement that not only pitted colonists against the mother country, but downtrodden artisans and small farmers against ...”

“... of their personalities, the clash between a man who insists there is no such thing as the self and a woman whose psychological disorder requires her to interpret everything in the world as relating to her. Of course, it’s Vander who proves the real egotist. ‘Were we,’ Vander asks, any of us, anything more than the sum of our attributes, even to ...”

“... pursuit of a woman. ‘Serves me right’ is his last conscious thought. As a protracted study in self-analysis, self-reproach and self-vindication, the Tommy novels are remarkable productions. ‘Have you discovered,’ Barrie asks his readers, ‘that I was really pitying the boy who ...”

“... on their teachings. The Buddha was moved by human suffering to seek enlightenment; Socrates was self-abnegating and wise in his knowledge of his own lack of wisdom; Confucius left politics to teach the importance of duty, self-cultivation and personal example. They all seem to have abided by their own teachings, which has ...”

“... a pragmatic Cold War liberal rather than a revolutionary socialist. Berlin’s portrait (or self-portrait) has stood largely unaltered for more than half a century. Herzen’s work has not had consistent backing inside or outside academia, on the left or on the right, and Aileen Kelly’s new biography is unlikely to provoke a revival, or the sort of ...”

“... heart of the book which was to become an important feature of modern thought. At the core of the self is something – the Will – which is implacably other to that self, an inert, intolerable weight of meaninglessness, as though we were all permanently pregnant with monsters. What makes me what I am is utterly ...”

“... the same series of implications: that all authentic poetry is the outcome of prolonged reflective self-knowledge; that all political involvements are the upshot of impulsive, unreflecting action; and that criticism is therefore best occupied in drawing out those ‘allegories’ of frustrated hope or non-fulfilment that constitute poetry’s chief lesson in ...”

“... of Crisp in the exhibition. You can read in it the dedicated model’s preternatural awareness of self. A sitter with no talent for self-presentation could stymie the photographer. But McBean had something to offer beyond complicity with the sitter’s self-projection. He was a ...”

“... how people use Instagram: among the most popular are #love, #me, #tbt (truth be told), #cute, #self, #beautiful, #girl, #summer, #happy, #fun, #smile and so on. Instagram users, nine out of ten of whom are under 35, the majority of them female, tend to use the service a lot, even at work, so its push-button simplicity is an important feature. Perhaps its ...”

“... summon a striking human presence. He could render human heads as unforgettable apparitions. In a self-portrait of c.1635, his features are reduced to a wedge-shaped smudge of light emerging from darkness. The Man with a Turban is similarly undone. His green-blue cloak wraps around his body, isolating his swathed head like a rock about to tumble down a steep ...”

“... a collapse of everything the country had stood for through twenty years of democratic freedom and self-determination. Munich represented the generals’ readiness to surrender a highly-equipped modern army on the first occasion when that army was called upon to fight; it represented a total collapse of what Havel, among the few who saw the past undistorted by ...”