“... But you’ve killed me!’ Barbara Comyns’s daughter, Caroline, recognised her younger self in Fanny, the little girl who dies of scarlet fever in Comyns’s second novel, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. ‘Poor, beautiful little Fanny! her life had been wasted because of stupidity and poverty.’ On its first publication in 1950, when Caroline was fifteen, Comyns insisted on the insertion of a qualifying sentence at the beginning to the effect that ‘the only things that are true in this story are the wedding and Chapters Ten, Eleven and Twelve and the poverty ...”

“... rebels against the responsibility, pushed in contrary directions by his growing body and sense of self.The most rudimentary online search will yield information about ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, often known in the UK as motor neurone disease and in the US as Lou Gehrig’s disease), enlarging on the grim implications of that word ...”

“... tilled with gods. Or, is that story a European myth in itself, subsequently foisted on Hawaiian self-memory by British and other foreign chroniclers? The latter is the thesis of Gananath Obeyesekere’s The Apotheosis of Captain Cook (1992), an angry and powerful attack on what Sahlins wrote in his first two books about Captain Cook being taken for a ...”

“... tristesse. The central character of the film, the petty criminal played by Belmondo, modelled his self-image on that of Humphrey Bogart in Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall. These films were not even ‘classics’ – they were little-regarded films dating from the mid-Fifties, movies which Andrew Sarris, a leading historian of Hollywood, later ...”

“... be accessed instantaneously. This service’s revenue would come from advertising, and it would be self-evidently useful to businessmen, travellers, adulterers, cheapskates – pretty much everybody, in short. The first emblematic thing about this notion is that it was based on an idea pure and simple, a piece of intellectual property which popped into ...”

“... handsome countenance which had dazzled so many courts was now permanently contorted with self-doubt and drink, and able to contemplate little more than flight (which before long he resorted to, deserting the stage of Italian politics for good). Machiavelli chose to extol him in Il Principe, nonetheless, because some facets of his career of conquest ...”

“... setting the dreamer and the child off on the work of inner transformation. In his letter of self-defence to Wells, James is both privileging the notion of self-expression – the idiosyncratic privacy of transformation – and taking it as inextricable from, of a piece with, living intensely. For James life was not ...”

“... as Sarah Bastard’s Notebook. In this book, Engel produced an interior monologue every bit as self-hating as those can sometimes be – the inner voice that mocks you in the voice of your mother. It is funny, deadly funny, but mostly on a second read. On the first you hear the sentences in your own deepest and most ...”

“... a degree of stylisation, both verbal and dramatic, that is both brilliantly poised and full of self-mockery (this last scene demurely enfolds into itself every distress and trouble of the huge preceding action and unfolds them into what are – famously and countably – 27 dénouements). The same coolness regulates what is theoretically the comic side of ...”

“... psychoanalysis, was inevitably to make his institutional loyalties problematic.The self-portraiture in narrative portraiture is hardly uncommon, but Adam Phillips is uncommonly fortunate in this choice among his precursors, since independence from, or playfulness with, precursors – refusing to comply with them is a way Winnicott liked to put ...”

“... that he has fucked up, particularly in the conduct of his three marriages, but his regret is more self-interested than moral. It isn’t so much the hurt that he has caused others – especially his second wife, Phoebe – that upsets him as the fact that his misdeeds have left him beached at the end of his life with no one to comfort him as death ...”

“... These derivative writings are carefully ranked. In first position is Arrian, clear, sober and self-assured, who wrote in the reign of Hadrian, over 450 years after Alexander’s death (aa). Over the past century there have been periodic attempts to challenge the ‘Arriankult’; none has succeeded in knocking him off the perch on which he was placed in ...”

“... appearances, stigmatised by her fashion choices. Politics were made personal in her. Her greed for self-gratification, her half-educated dabbling in public affairs, were adduced as a reason the French were bankrupt and miserable. It was ridiculous, of course. She was one individual with limited power and influence, who focused the rays of misogyny. She was a ...”

“... was charged with manslaughter. Wang took the case on, entering a plea of not guilty on grounds of self-defence. The trial began early this year. When the judge rejected her request to authenticate footage the prosecutors claimed had been captured by surveillance cameras, she walked out of court and held up a placard outside the building, condemning the ...”

“... of disinterested inquiry and the transmission of a cultural and intellectual inheritance are self-evident public goods; and so on. While that conception of a university and its purposes is still very much alive and may, I suspect, still be the one held by a great many ‘ordinary’ citizens, we may be nearing the point, at least in Britain, where it is ...”