“... is characteristic. His poems shrink interestingly from the single, arrogating point of view, the self-possessed lyric ‘I’. You, I, he, she, we, it are liable to take each other’s place without warning, until, as ‘The Barber’s Beard’ puts it: Jack and the poet and the pronouns shrug, take a breath each, and melt into the blue. It is with the ...”

“... Between one dash and the next, as in the passage below, his passions move from an imagined self-assertion (as a cannibal, no less) to an imputed self-abasement (shame, deceit, cowardice). – and there was something unnatural and at first glance even enigmatic in the passionate and almost reverential way in which ...”

“... not indicate the year), Castro suggested to his hosts that he might engage in an act of public self-criticism for the many anti-Soviet comments he had made since the time of the Missile Crisis. The Russians advised him not to make any such self-criticism. They had invested a lot of capital in building up the image and ...”

“... themselves. This exhibition asks both, without labouring the point or falling away from self-awareness into self-regard. In the early part of the show, we move from images of forest savages, hybrids and wild women, up through prints of humans bubbling away in cooking pots (Grands Voyages de Théodore de ...”

“... 2012, and even when they do, the scenery is pretty inconsequential. Surprisingly, Essex is rather self-effacing. Nikolaus Pevsner’s introduction to his Buildings of England volume for Essex made it clear that he considered the county tainted by association. Who, he wondered in 1954, would ever want to go ‘touring and sightseeing’ there, after ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... options to justify going to war in Iraq. They could argue that they were acting against Iraq in self-defence. But plainly they weren’t. They could argue there was a humanitarian crisis looming. There wasn’t. The only remaining way to go to war legally was to get Security Council authorisation. Greenstock found the possibility that the Americans would ...”

“... the French story that it could have been nothing else. And Maurycy Szczucki, our unrelenting self-investigator, is propelled into new roles as accomplice, husband, useful idiot and prisoner, going from being an existential journeyman to a deep causal agent, lifting the lid on questions of love and loyalty as he goes. He may be a victim of the 20th ...”

“... is present from the moment the first of the protagonists, Justine, goes for an early-morning run: self-vaunting about her fitness, she turns out to have a heart murmur, ‘like a fish flopping’, and has been told never to go running alone. As the hours pass and each character in turn steps centre-stage, tensions build. Everyone’s worried about ...”

“... 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 ...”