“... Artemidorus wrote, ‘is a sign that our spirit admonishes and foretells us affectionately the self same thing worthy to be thought upon.’ I appreciate the gentleness of that ‘affectionately’; some of my own consultations become shared reflections on what recurring dreams might mean. A patient with a recurring bad dream may choose to suppress it ...”

“... a place to which people have been running for years, whether to escape or to find some invented self. After the reading I took questions. Then the moderator announced that there was time for only one more question. A woman, who had been standing the whole time at the end of the large room, with her back to the wall, spoke. ‘I am Syrian,’ she said. ‘I ...”

“... categories that defined artistic practice in her lifetime. There was no widespread tradition of self-portraiture in 16th-century Italy, despite the fact, as Michael Cole writes, that it is often seen as a defining feature of Renaissance art. Sofonisba made more images of herself than any other artist in the century between Dürer and Rembrandt. These ...”

“... upbringing; there is a suggestion, in turn, that Miller’s confused sexuality and lack of self-control are consequences of his mother’s emotional abuse. Trauma, for Wallace, is a family inheritance: his grandmother believed that his mother’s rape, from which his older brother was conceived, was her own fault – she ‘got what she had ...”

“... of birds.The concept of body ownership is premised on dualism: the idea that one’s thinking self can exercise rights over one’s material self. This too is historically particular. In early modern Europe, mind and body were understood to be mingled, and this was a source of anxiety when it came to gestation. A ...”

“... smile’ when he asks for one of the better bedrooms at the retreat, and he is mindful of his self-absorption, talking of ‘my unwieldy, despotic ego’ or, in the third person, ‘his fearful, narcissistic little ego’ or, generalising, ‘the knot of obsession, megalomania and the noble desire to do a good job that constitutes a writer’s ego’.His ...”

“... modelled on the Manchu alphabet. Tsu has some entertaining stories about the adventures of the self-aggrandising Wang, as related in his multi-volume memoir. After being charged with treason in 1898 for opposing what he saw as the Qing dynasty’s capitulation to the Western world, Wang fled to Japan; two years later he returned in disguise as a Buddhist ...”

“... and people were on the lookout. So when a bank employee on his lunch break noticed a tall, self-assured Englishman going in and out of a number of different banks in central Melbourne, he called the police. They were told by the British authorities that two prominent Englishmen had gone missing and that there was a way of telling them apart: one had a ...”

“... Ulster Unionist Party leader, Doug Beattie, to describe him as a ‘juvenile, pathetic, moronic, self-indulgent, narcissistic fool who jokes … as people die’. Wilson is one of the DUP’s longest serving politicians, close to Eurosceptic Tories in the European Research Group. He urged the British government to take the hardest possible stance during ...”

“... at the Art League in Manhattan. ‘I buried my former arrogance; a tendency towards nihilistic self-complacency was relegated to the deepest cellar of my being,’ he wrote. ‘Eventually I managed pleasant phrases and gave compliments that I only half believed. I learned how by praise one could teach the difficult skill of drawing.’ For the first few ...”

“... or remove the possibility that use of the islands could be hampered by external pressures for self-determination’. To achieve these goals the inhabitants were expelled. BIOT Immigration Ordinance No. 1, issued on 16 April 1971, made presence on the islands without military clearance a crime. Shortly thereafter the islanders were unceremoniously deported ...”

“... to dismantle their respectable lives, hide from their good fortune and ignore all instincts for self-preservation in the hope of attaining godliness – even sainthood. Miss Goering lives in a grand and beautiful home but decides that ‘in order to work out my own little idea of salvation … it is necessary for me to live in some more tawdry place.’ She ...”

“... of Amis’s novels that the hero-as-shit, at large in a world of mutual animosity and obsessive self-interest, is one of their most characteristic figures. In The folks that live on the hill the hero-as-shit has given way to the hero-as-patriarch. Harry Caldecote, a retired librarian, heads an extended family of the weak, the lost and the habitually drunk ...”

“... which is full democracy. But ancient administrators, even at their height, do not match the self-motivating efficiency of the grand Berlin bureausaurs Weber observed: what moved the ancients, he notes, was the boot, not esprit de corps. Not much could be hoped from the single public slave who presided over the Athenian archives. Down in the ...”

“... fashionable world. Following the portraits in sequence, one watches him gathering skills. A stiff self-portrait about the age of twenty shows him in a Cavalier lace collar and a cloak lined with red. Anne Bateman, painted a year or so later, is also board- (and perhaps bored-) stiff. Five years on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of ...”