“... 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 ...”

“... like her parents, of the mystic G.I. Gurdjieff and ‘the Work’, his ‘proprietary system for self-realisation’. ‘Gurdjieff taught,’ Richardson writes, ‘that most people are asleep, barely conscious automatons who float through their lives without ever fully living them … And in this state of passive sleepwalking, we mistake our mechanical ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Mozart. But the wonderful clear lines of the poetry carry a note of hesitancy, of the lack of self-knowledge behind Salieri’s bleak and self-righteous convictions. Is he perhaps animated by low envy, the involuntary hatred of the lesser for the great? The piece ends with such questions hanging in the air, and in our ...”

“... to be both in and out of the game, as Whitman put it – to have a private as well as a public self. Mark Twain went to great lengths to impose himself on the crowd, and he was a more successful performer than Messrs Vidal and Mailer, but he was also able to hold a self in reserve. For Hemingway it was all much more ...”

“... who ought to have known better, slavishly followed the American lead. Parsons, who is disarmingly self-critical in his attempts to find out ‘How we got it wrong’, says he deliberately refrained from offering the Shah advice on internal affairs, in case it interfered with the lucrative business of obtaining contracts, especially in the military ...”