“... to be selling. The Democrats made the mistake of assuming that his vulgarity and ignorance were self-evident: the voters had only to see them to know he was unfit for the presidency. This year, they made the same mistake, and they came eerily close to a second disaster. Biden-Harris lost Florida, where they could have clinched a victory early on election ...”

“... the offices of Cauce, the story becomes fact: ‘I’m not imagining that part; I read it.’This self-consciousness leads Fernández to devise a series of analogies – from Yuri Gagarin’s spaceflight to a Chris Marker documentary about the Pacific War and Dickens’s A Christmas Carol – to help her navigate the territory. Some are more successful than ...”

“... about its associations with the Anglocentric arrogance of what is sometimes called Whig history, a self-satisfied celebration of England’s relatively smooth progress towards liberal outcomes. The historical reaction against Whig triumphalism also exposed the intellectual limitations of constitutional history as a means of apprehending the past. Between the ...”

“... the pioneering (and sometimes strangely stumbling) attempts at analysis by such early masters of self-consciousness as Plato and Aristotle. What was a word? How could meaning reside in a sound? Why are some sequences of words better than others, and how many dimensions of comparison are there? Some utterances are false but beautiful, others are true but ugly ...”

“... such a confusion of impressions that it threatened to collapse the boundary between the self and the world outside. To avoid psychological breakdown, the urban dweller had to become ‘blasé’ – less an attitude in Simmel’s account than the result of the ‘incapacity to react to new stimuli’. Modern life required people to develop a ...”

“... school experience a nightmare. He’d left school at thirteen and embarked on a life of unofficial self-employment, beginning with a surprisingly popular line in repairing sash window cords door-to-door; later, he ran a garage out of a London squat. My brother, fourteen years older than me, also found himself out of the school system early, ultimately leaving ...”

“... and general air of collapse, it is hard not to see in these ‘portraits’ a devasting image of self, something dragged out from within, like entrails. Bourgeois often wore her insides on the outside. ‘For me, sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture,’ she said, a point she reiterated in 1975 when she posed with the latex mould of Avenza on the ...”

“... an article about elephant insemination. Was that a deliberate decision to show the solipsism and self-absorption of Harvard undergraduates?A year and a half later, in September 2018, I had a similar encounter at the Mantua book festival. The political mood, and my role in it, felt strangely familiar. Matteo Salvini, a far-right nativist Eurosceptic widely ...”

“... is a bull shot, like the cocktail at the bar in Langan’s Brasserie. It consists of Langan’s self-portrait, written in the sleepless marches, to which the art critic Brian Sewell has contributed a memoir of friendship which will come as a pleasant surprise to readers more accustomed to his inspired Sowerberry in the columns of the Evening Standard. Last ...”

“... the necessary ruthlessness, The soaring meanness that pinpoints success. We loved that lack of self-love, and your smile, Rueful, at your own silliness.                             Meanwhile, Your lungs collapsed, and the machine, unstrained, Did all your breathing now. Nothing remained But death by drowning on an inland sea Of ...”

“... thus becomes the centre of analysis. Headhunting is the youth’s supreme act of autonomy and self-realisation and also corresponds to the hopes of his elders that their group can reproduce themselves by seizing on this triumphant vigour ‘in the face of inevitable facts of aging and decline’. This is a finely strung account, and its notes sound ...”

“... Fiction hadn’t happened: written as if for publication in the Strand Magazine for 1899? The self-consciousness of the style shows that it is artifice, not artlessness: ‘If it had not been for the shooting and the firing, the speeding and the general traffic violations I doubt if we would have got to Trafalgar Square.’ That was the ...”

“... first run Small boys swarmed when they came to the word Arrestingly etched in the footpath. It was self-protected by its perfect calligraphy – The scrupulous sweep of a hand that had spent its lifetime Writing Eternity. He was born in a Balmain slum and raised underneath it, Sleeping on hessian bags with his brothers and sisters To keep beyond fist’s reach ...”

“... the painting nod to humanist ideas (the skull, for instance, might symbolise Erasmus’ concept of self-knowledge). The painting was a gift to a Roman Catholic, though, and may be, as the catalogue suggests, ‘a painted argument in their intellectual exchange of ideas’. The volume of Dürer’s journals that describes his trip to Antwerp in 1520 is the ...”

“... took place, the legal justification for the kill order – that it was an act of national self-defence against an imminent threat, as described in Article 51 of the UN Charter – looked shaky, to say the least, and will be challenged. Aerial drones have somehow come to stand for the scary future of war. They hover invisibly overhead, and can fire ...”