“... Island. The account of their relationship in Here Lies the Heart is full of Mercedes’s usual self-serving B-movie twaddle. (‘When I saw Isadora Duncan for the first time in my life she waved a scarf at me, and the last time I saw her she waved a scarf at me. And it was a scarf that killed her!’) On one unforgettable occasion, de Acosta wrote, Duncan ...”

“... making phones or yoga tops: it’s all work, variously risky and soul-destroying forms of self-rental.‘Some surrogacy abolitionists will … mistake me for a “neoliberal” advocate of the industry,’ Lewis writes. ‘Much to my chagrin.’ She defines her position as ‘21st-century communist ...”

“... of reasoning’, but admitted that after receiving her letter he needed ‘some time to recover my self out of that wonder I was cast into, to see such a Letter from a Woman’.These women philosophers required a good deal of grit. As the historian Carol Pal has shown, many 17th-century women scholars went out of their way to forge intergenerational networks ...”

“... the fucking stipend? Lewis.’‘Life has been something of a war for me,’ he wrote in forlorn self-exile at a New York hotel in 1939; but this cast of mind predated his time in the army. His very earliest stories were written while he was staying in Brittany in 1908, belatedly collected as The Wild Body twenty years later, and they show that Lewis ...”

“... a nightmare of denial.In the ‘way-west’ myth that underpins Didion’s idea of her Californian self, there is always the struggle to get there. ‘You drop baggage,’ she wrote, ‘you jettison the piano and the books and your grandmother’s rosewood chest, or you don’t get to Independence Rock in time to make the Sierra before snowfall.’ At the time ...”

“... trigender, agender, intergender, pangender, neutrois, third gender, androgyne, two-spirit, self-coined, genderfluid. In 2011 the New York-based journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues brought out a special issue on transgender subjectivities. ‘In these pages,’ the psychoanalyst Virginia Goldner wrote in her editor’s note, ‘you will meet persons who ...”

“... that one of the things about being a child is that you are a parasite of sorts and have to self-righteously brazen it out. I want. They were good at wanting, and I shared much more common ground with them than with my mother when I was three or four years old. Also, they measured up to the magical monsters in the story-books. Grandma’s idea of ...”

“... of government; and both were extremely careful to do exactly that. In business terms, their self-defined role was that of the chairman of the board rather than chief executive. That had the effect of systematically transferring the burden of responsibility to their subordinates. When presented with some government error or misdeed, Eisenhower and Reagan ...”

“... by Jones’s clamorous appeals – Freud is more than willing to remind Jones of his abject self. Jones was certainly preoccupied, in more ways than one, by what to call his potent self: ‘Jones’ seemed singularly unpromising. Given, as Jones writes in one of these letters, that ‘psychoanalysis is ...”

“... rock stars come to clean up on the South African circuit so long off-limits to them; endless self-appointed ‘monitoring’ teams from black American universities; old South African exiles like the actor Anthony Sher, the ex-clergyman Cosmas Desmond – now the only white man on the PAC list – and Ronald Segal, once editor of the Penguin Africa ...”

“... he wants to avoid. I shall focus more on the first of these devices. Heidegger often uses quotes self-consciously to make subtle distinctions. As Derrida makes clear, Heidegger’s own method of deconstructing the history of philosophy involves putting quotes around the traditional philosophemes like ‘spirit’, ‘soul’ and, in general, any term ...”

“... to let the documents speak. Whereas sociologists tested hypotheses, refined concepts and offered a self-consciously theoretical analysis, historians remained wedded to the instance, accumulating endless examples and finding exceptions to every rule. Knowledge of the sources was the profession’s substitute for thought. For the more outspoken radicals, and the ...”

“... syndrome, composed of circumstances and behaviour. Your idea of real feelings, and of a real self, cannot intelligibly be applied to any but your own case. Use of the same words about ‘others’ is a kind of pun. This is the concept of mind that Wittgenstein was fighting against in the Thirties. Pears shows how the attack on solipsism prefigures the ...”

“... in Letters Concerning the English Nation, was the country of religious toleration, robust self-government, vibrant commerce and advanced ideas. Montesquieu’s dithyrambic praise of the English constitution in The Spirit of the Laws, like Diderot’s for Samuel Richardson (‘O Richardson, Richardson ... I will keep you on the same shelf with ...”

“... Morgan’s death in 1913. ‘In time little will remain except the feeling of bewilderment that a self-ruling people should ever have allowed one man to wield so much power for good or evil over their prosperity and general welfare, however much ability and strength and genius that man possessed.’ Morgan’s good fortune began at birth – in 1837. The ...”