“... Whatever her feelings, she maintained her silence. Yet she was not without defenders. Dickens’s self-vindications generated a tumult of gossip and speculation. Thackeray wrote to his mother: ‘There is some row about an actress in the case, and he denies with the utmost infuriation any charge against her or himself … It is agreed they are to part … To ...”

“... they are both virgins, in their final weeks of school, on the cusp of everything. But they are self-aware and self-doubting in a way the older characters are not, and with this comes a greater degree of honesty as well as humour. The scene where Connie nearly loses her virginity is one of the best in the book. Her aunt ...”

“... he would be forced to look back on the abandonment of his family with nothing but regret and self-reproach.) Wallace’s title, The View from Here, is a phrase Williams used to capture the contingent and perspectival determinants of our values and commitments. Although Wallace believes that not all practical or value judgments are perspectival in this ...”

“... Lawson. His scholarly background is in Holocaust studies. Instituted, in part, to promote ‘self-reflection’, Holocaust studies are presented in Britain, at least popularly (all those Second World War programmes on the History Channel), as exclusively to do with Germany, and the reflection they reinforce is the old ...”

“... the elegance of Irving Penn.† It’s perhaps too easy to read this show with hindsight and find self-hatred seeping through it all, but self-disgust and the fear of imaginative collapse are forcefully conveyed. He rallied strongly with the digital innovations of ‘Plato’s Atlantis’, but McQueen was already ...”

“... but to respond, and the gap would shrink as a result. Democracy, like the market, was seen as a self-correcting system. This makes some sense as a description of politics in the mid-20th century, when unions were stronger, voter turnout was higher, and the general expectation was that the state would take responsibility for adjudicating class conflict. But ...”

“... oil price above $50 a barrel for the first time in the country’s history. Violent activism and self-enrichment continued after 2007’s rigged election, but suddenly subsided in 2009, when the government launched a well-funded amnesty programme to pay off ‘the boys’ in the armed groups. Militant leaders such as Alhaji Mujahid Dokubo-Asari – the ...”

“... to be you, then you are conscious. Consciousness is also, as before, sometimes seen as a special self-aware kind of thought. So today the literature often makes divisions between different senses of the term, distinguishing ‘phenomenal’ consciousness – the feel of experience – from senses that have to do with ...”

“... film of the Patrick Hamilton play Gaslight, in which Charles Boyer drives Ingrid Bergman mad with self-doubt through devious manipulations that include the gradual damping-down of the gaslight lamps in their marital home. Use of the accusation might tend to exculpate the accused, since anyone capable of applying it is surely better equipped than Bergman to ...”

“... Humboldt’s books, popular lectures, extensive correspondence – and his impressive talent for self-promotion – brought him into contact with Europe’s scientific elite as well as the educated public. Not everyone was an admirer. Schiller, for example, was rather less impressed by the young Humboldt than Goethe had been. Bismarck, then an ambitious ...”

“... filthy puterfaction, Our meat and drink were made, which bred Infection.The job of John Taylor, self-styled ‘water-poet’, was to keep the waterways clear. Gruber von Arni paints a grim picture of a Council of War overwhelmed by having too many people dependent on it, too few resources and waves of typhus and plague. Treatment centres were set up in the ...”

“... from memory? This singular approach makes Bonnard’s later work both childlike and, given his self-imposed constraints, highly accomplished, lending it in the best instances a charm and inquisitiveness that is not entirely well served by the Tate Modern show, the first major British exhibition of his work in twenty years. The last occasion, in 1998, took ...”

“... to know yet cannot not know, something that must be disavowed, save in the secret closet of the self.Characters caught up in exactly the same story form the basis of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. The old man leaves the money to his niece so that she can ‘meet the requirements of her imagination’. The phrase belongs to the old man’s ...”

“... his presidency barely a month after the event, isn’t his private, inner voice; it’s a public, self-justifying voice, which is perhaps all we can expect from a novel written by a former US president and his collaborators, but anyone hoping for a flash of insight, however brief, into what it’s like to be both an ordinary, fallible human being and the most ...”

“... in science fiction known as the New Wave. In 2002, Harrison summed up the New Wave’s aims in a self-deprecating reassessment of his novel The Centauri Device (1974), which succeeded, in his view, insofar as it ‘took the piss out of SF’s three main tenets: (1) the reader-identification character always drives the action; (2) the universe is ...”