“... 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 ...”

“... an excuse for indulgence, but it would be hard to find anyone who thinks that this sort of self-justification is rational behaviour. Something similar applies to procrastination. You can always tell yourself that it doesn’t matter if you put off a piece of work until tomorrow, but do you really think that this is a rational way to carry on, given the ...”

“... LaMonte Young, was the band’s violist and played bass guitar. Maureen ‘Mo’ Tucker, a self-taught teenage percussionist, played standing up, without cymbals or pedals, and was one of only a very few female drummers in rock. Sterling Morrison, the band’s fine second guitarist, has always been underappreciated, partly because he maintained he was ...”

“... province with a group of idealistic students who wanted to combine a life of manual labour with self-directed study. In 1972, he moved with them to a factory and spent ten years there, working through the day and reading at night, before eventually resuming his formal education in 1982, just as Deng Xiaoping began to marketise large sections of China’s ...”

“... being moved. My own leg, in this moment, was no longer my own, and no longer part of my body or my self. No longer part of anything – unreal, absurd. (‘That which is not Body is no part of the Universe,’ writes Hobbes, ‘and since the Universe is All, it is Nothing and Nowhere.’) Suddenly, then, my leg (my ex-leg) was Nothing and Nowhere: it was ...”

“... nowadays I’m not sure that ‘the pictures’, like ‘the wireless’, aren’t among the self-consciously adopted emblems of fogeydom, the verbal equivalent of those smart Covent Garden establishments that do a line in old luggage. But calling the pictures ‘the movies’ went with calling cigarettes ‘fags’, beer ‘booze’ or girls ...”