“... in 1992, when connections were slow, internet users pseudonymous, and the rooms where they chatted self-regulating and unmonitored. It was a zone of freedom and forgiveness where identities could be picked up and discarded without consequence. Say something silly or stupid and you could simply change your handle and join the other chatroom denizens in mocking ...”

“... indicated by this and similar quotations (including one, I am disconcerted to find, by my younger self), the term expanded at some point to embrace historical accounts of ‘continuing and inevitable’ progress in any desirable direction, rather than simply the direction implied in the original political sense. The clue – a rather gnomic one – to the ...”

“... she has escaped worried objections or been guiltless of deliberately provoking them. There is a self-mortifying element in Humphries’s theatre which is all the more striking because the selves are multiple, and which goes all the way back to the beginning of his career. But so does his extraordinary sense of language, best studied in the monologues of ...”

“... for example, celebrities of the Left. You might want to argue that for this kind of celebrity any self-aggrandisement is offset by the collective good aimed at by their necessarily public commitment. There is a famous psychoanalytic article by Harold Searles called ‘The Effort to Drive the Other Person Crazy’, in which he lovingly details all the ways ...”

“... and cannot resist the irritating familiarity of ‘Sam’. Knowlson’s style is on the whole self-effacing, soberly and relentlessly factual and, in the information stakes, altogether more substantial, given the sources at his disposal. There is much that is new here: for example, on the subject of Beckett’s psychotherapy with Wilfred Bion at the ...”

“... cynic. Future historians are, I suspect, more likely to depict him as sanctimonious and self-deceiving than as self-consciously amoral and ruthlessly cunning. But just suppose that a latter-day Machiavelli had been asked to devise a ten-point programme for a leader of the British Labour Party at the end of the ...”

“... job and that every intervention by an editor involves a small surrender of the soul.’ He had the self-regard of the incorrigible scribbler, then, but not much else, and it was Althusser, apparently, who dissuaded him from a purely literary career. Yet Praised Be Our Lords, volume two of the memoir, is a great book. Fluent, witty, argumentative for ...”

“... of fractures and abscesses than exposure to accident as a professional hazard. Every Man is in its self-mythologising way the record of a charmed life. The tarantula Herzog once found asleep in one of his shoes and the giant scorpion which spent the night under him in a hammock both declined, for reasons best known to themselves, to put an end to him. A plane ...”

“... to recognise Eileen’s ‘humanising influence’ and characterises her letters as ‘poignant, self-effacing, hopeful and yet full of hurt’. But Funder’s wider aim is to show that ‘wifedom is a wicked magic trick we have learned to play on ourselves. I want to expose how it is done and so take its wicked, tricking power away.’ She ascribes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”