“... well out of these dreams. I believe that man, nowadays, is more fanatical than ever. But it’s self-infatuation. He sings of nothing else, and in the action of the mind that leaps beyond the stars, devouring space and gazing on infinity, as Montaigne would say, he finds nothing more exalted than that same human misery from which the mind is constantly ...”

“... a given, whose components and attributes must always be there to be known or discovered, seems self-evident to the medical patient, the medical practitioner, the micro-biologist of the present day. Much writing in medical history takes it for granted that our current approaches to knowing and describing the body correspond exactly to an objective reality ...”

“... comfort to those who like to believe that ‘the problems of post-colonial nations are largely self-inflicted.’ There is shrewd analysis of certain habitual expressions of Naipaul, his use of such words as ‘mimicry’, ‘parasitism’, ‘barbaric’, ‘primitive’, ‘self-violation’, ‘exile’ (rather than ...”

“... rented from Alison Lurie. When I had finished reading she asked anxiously: ‘Do you think it’s self-pitying?’ (It’s not, but it is heart-rending.) A few months later, in another rented house (East Hampton in August), she was furious with me for getting the pages of some later chapters mixed up while I was reading them. Janet loved the ...”

“... to myself, were it not for the grace of God. And I at once found the thought so disgusting, so self-centred, so conceited, that I immediately banished it from my consciousness. Here and elsewhere in Somalia, Richburg the journalist fails in his duty to his subject. He finds the victims disgusting, while enjoying the company of the warlords, to whom he ...”

“... personalised: literally given a face. Death became ‘a threatening Other, or a morbid anti-self – the one we are each born to meet, an uncanny companion we carry with us through life, a hidden double who will discover himself at the appointed hour’. The second striking characteristic of Early Modern death was its shamefulness. The ‘Dance of ...”

“... the ‘inland sea’ is the Mediterranean, and it is a vessel of people – her migrant self, or Syrian refugees – that lands, or almost lands, precariously on the shelf or shoreline. This is deft work, and we can admire it as we admire a great technician, but Stallings is also making a philosophical point: the reality is that metaphor, true to ...”

“... an oeil de boeuf window. It belongs to no school, though there is some affinity with another self-designed, but suburban, house of a very different painter, Roger Fry. The inclusion of this remote, largely unrecorded site is again testimony to Orbach’s determination and willingness to follow rutted, unmade, probably private roads through parched ...”

“... irreparably stained by her old life, she abandons her throne for a convent, and then swoons into a self-willed, shame-ridden death. Just as the princely father noticed a purity of spirit in the girl from the city’s underbelly, we, or at least the media-makers who cater to our guilty interests, saw a brand of charm in Jade. She had the quality which most ...”

“... the Indigenous peoples’. It constituted an assault on their ‘freedom, legal and social rights, self-determination, self-sovereignty’. And, what’s more:Leaving out most people also meant that the society did not use or acknowledge or respect the creativity of most people, the intelligence of most people, the life ...”

“... his skill at managing effects, and for the medium, then only about fifteen years old. The second self-portrait, one of the first photographs you encounter in the exhibition, is different and not. Fenton is half-seated on a table covered in a sheepskin rug and supporting a bottle of beer and a tankard; a rifle is cocked in his hands and pointed out to the ...”

“... going to pretend to have read it all – I have a PhD in 19th-century British history, and some self-respect. It is a criminally bad book. But I doubt that my or anyone else’s saying so will make much difference to anything. Trevor-Roper was fascinated and amused by Robert Peters, but also spent a great deal of time and energy informing susceptible ...”

“... in the imagination, Stevens said, ‘is to be regarded not as a phase of humanism but as a vital self-assertion in a world in which nothing but the self remains, if that remains’.Stevens himself later wrote that ‘Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation,’ and we need slightly longer examples, perhaps, to ...”

“... private to public could be used to illustrate a point Spacks borrows from Habermas (‘individual self-contemplation prepared the way for the assumption of power’), though in the 17th century the public-private antithesis would have been expressed in terms of action and contemplation. As to the word’s second use, Milton, having described ...”

“... of his achievements by his son and the Duke of Buckingham. Stewart reads it as ‘a rare hint of self-knowledge’ in which the King recognised that he remained ‘an infant, an innocent for whom the harsh realities of kingship are still unimaginable’. Stewart makes the interesting observation that ‘James was strangely aloof from many of the phenomena ...”