“... of Mondrian as well as the formalist criticism of Roger Fry; he saw a ‘disdain for the self’ in both. ‘The new painter,’ Newman insisted, ‘is concerned with his subject matter, with his thought.’ The term ‘plasmic image’ didn’t catch on, but he had more luck with ‘ideographic picture’, the title of an essay published in ...”

“... Donald Trump, whose narcissistic exhibitionism offered a never-ending source of unintentional self-satire. ‘Who’s my toughest competitor – if not in content, only in style?’ he asked. ‘Prince Charles,’ he answered. ‘I’m thinking of becoming an entertainer,’ he also said. ‘Liza Minnelli gets $75,000 a night to sing, and I’m really ...”

“... this year, released from the Beast and now a hollowed-out, understaffed shell of its former self, saw its managers fire a group of their own senior journalists in an unsuccessful attempt to suppress an investigation into the magazine’s finances. Newsweek was particularly vulnerable to the flood of free information and images unleashed by the ...”

“... that was ‘unmodern’. This notion persisted after decolonisation and in many ways shapes our self-understanding. ‘In several respects,’ Mbembe writes, ‘Africa still constitutes the metaphor through which the West represents the origin of its own norms, develops a self-image and integrates this image into the set ...”

“... In ‘Borges and I’, he wrote: I must remain in Borges rather than in myself (if in fact I am a self), and yet I recognise myself less in his books than in many others, or in the rich strumming of a guitar. Some years ago I tried to get away from him: I went from suburban mythologies to playing games with time and infinity. But these are Borges’s games ...”

“... he looks pale, spindly and rather stupid: a poorly-fed, late Victorian adolescent overfond of self-abuse. In the second, the one with the moustache, he is stouter, tougher, dreamier, and looks distressingly like both my mother and my cousin Toby. My companion Blakey says he looks like me. I don’t see it. I’ve been fascinated by him – and the Great ...”

“... wrought, judicious introduction describes Browne’s wide-ranging curiosity, his influences, his self-fascination, his faith and doubts. A pocket edition of Browne is good to have not least because his aphoristic style rewards casual reading. Open it at any page, and find a surprise. Browne thought of himself as a natural philosopher, what we would now call ...”

“... on the loose: it’s an alternative account, and it has its own narrative. It’s not only a self-justifying means of expression for a man who has no other outlet, whose real voice nobody otherwise will ever hear; it also has a notional addressee: the rich, the fat, the smug. And it isn’t quite as ingenuous as it sounds. As it builds to a climax, it ...”

“... be called Tory and Whig. This secrecy also allowed for corrupt bargains, unholy alliances and the self-interested actions for which the members of this Long Parliament became famous. It may also account for the paucity of sources from which historians can derive the Long Parliament’s history. The first half of Patterson’s study is an examination of those ...”

“... and not enough granite in her being. The missing granite is provided by Anne Lindell, Violet’s self-portrait in Broderie anglaise, no longer a character cloaked in legend like Sasha, a mirage disappearing into the distance. Far from being a ravishingly beautiful woman, she ‘wasn’t even pretty’. ‘Her features were irregular; her nose turned up, her ...”

“... inner compositions which, like magnets, attract further impressions and serve as the core of the self’s creative articulation.’ This seems exactly right, and very important. What comes out of a successful analysis is the discovery not of a hidden desire but of primordial structures of motivation that organise one’s experience of ...”

“... and the perspective of TN with which I am directly presented are not the point of view of the true self, for the true self has no point of view … Something essential about me has nothing to do with my perspective and position in the world. ‘Unless you have had this thought yourself,’ Nagel writes, ‘it will probably ...”

“... the look of others through Their own eyes. A digest of their correct impressions of Their self-analytical attitudes overlaid by your Ghostly transparent face. These lines from ‘Wet Casements’ stage the philosophical problem of other minds, of trying to justify the belief that others have an inner experience like our own. The passage seems to ...”

“... more characteristic trait of Mann’s writing, the reason Nabokov dismissed him as a pretentiously self-monumentalising nonentity. One scarcely thinks of playfulness in connection with Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain, and Joseph and His Brothers, whatever comic interludes it may include, tends to sink under the weight of its narrative detail and its ...”

“... dismembering them? What’s to prevent them from doing things like that?’ In his memoir – self-published, self-justifying – the chief of medicine, Richard Deichmann, claimed it was necessary to shut down the hospital fast because ‘patients with all kinds of serious infections … in intimate, unsanitary ...”