“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a fair-minded referee of their battles with Labour’s centrists. His story begins with Benn’s self-reinvention as a tribune of the people in the wake of 1968. Benn’s foundational insight was that ‘more people want to do more for themselves, and believe they are capable of doing so, if the conditions could only be created that would make this ...”

“... series and the pastoral tradition, as well as to the mixture of dramatic speaking and self-revelation that sonnets often exhibit. In the following decades, once Frost had developed his theories about the desirability of poetry’s proximity to ordinary speech, he tended to claim that his influences came from life rather than literature. ‘I want ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... religion and its shadowy aftermath. The poem seemed to have a lovely assuredness and finality. The self-deprecating voice – resigned and a bit sad – was having an argument with no one. The tone was mild and tolerant, and although it was filled with uncertainty, there was a convincing veneer of pure certainty about the main matter, which is that churches ...”

“... with near universal international support. Beijing wanted nothing to do with Wijeweera’s Maoist self-fashioning: Zhou Enlai offered Bandaranaike weapons with which to stamp out the JVP. With Wijeweera in prison, the remaining JVP hardliners went underground – they would reappear in the 1980s – but the concerns they had raised did not go unheeded by the ...”

“... hyper-partisan broadcasters, Trump-era populism and conspiracy theory were already creating a self-contained alternative political thought space conducive to the cross-fertilisation of conspiracist ideas. Covid-19 and government efforts to control it – an extreme event, accompanied by what can seem baffling and intrusive restrictions – appear, in the ...”