“... beliefs that would otherwise be irretrievable. Ultimately, the magic of The Arabian Nights is self-designating, instanced in what the stories effect as much as in what they relate. ‘Shahrazad’s ransom tale-telling could be described as a single, prolonged act of performative utterance,’ Warner explains, ‘by which she demonstrates the power of ...”

“... his work has moved in the other direction, detecting an excessive investment of energy in early, self-contained sections (the runaway balloon in Enduring Love, the Arctic expedition in Solar), to the detriment of the books as wholes. McEwan has displayed a wide variation over his writing career, in terms of the relative level of ambition in individual ...”

“... as democratic levellers. When the girls arrive at Hever Castle, they find another artificial and self-contained environment. They are disturbed by the ghost-crowded aura of the castle (a childhood home of Anne Boleyn) and rush towards the wide-open spaces of the estate. The bad writing of this section may be a piece of cleverness I don’t quite get. Here ...”

“... Italians, Hungarians, Poles – oppressed by the great Continental empires. His belief in self-determination did not extend to lesser breeds within Europe, and certainly not beyond. He and the Liberal politician Richard Cobden believed that general amity would be reinforced by free trade and benign capitalism. Socialist thinkers, on the ...”

“... were overwritten with an implicit judgment that these were not messages from beyond the self but errors in mental functioning. As such they were by definition pathological, and increasingly viewed as symptoms of insanity. Debates in mid-century French psychiatry reflected these assumptions. Were hallucinations a malfunction of the sense organs ...”

“... from a Kertész photograph of Mondrian (also taken in 1926), and there is some of that alluring self-involvement about Gray, alongside the thrill of her androgyny. There are less well-known photographs from the session with Abbott, one with the subject smiling in half-profile, chin almost resting on her clasped hands on which she wears some huge ...”

“... Memory creates our identity, but it also exposes the illusion of a coherent self: a memory is not a thing but an act that alters and rearranges even as it retrieves. Although some of its operations can be trained to an astonishing pitch, most take place autonomously, beyond the reach of the conscious mind. As we age, it distorts and foreshortens: present experience becomes harder to impress on the mind, and the long-forgotten past seems to draw closer; University Challenge gets easier, remembering what you came downstairs for gets harder ...”

“... makes the journey via his own urethra, an experience that’s described as ‘odd’ and ‘self-referential’. Many things are possible at the HoH: reversible ‘crotchal transfers’, for instance, or sex, of a sort, with Rimsky-Korsakov. In exchange for a larger penis, a man called Dave has an arm lopped off. Another man, Dune, threatened with the ...”

“... without dogma; art without indulgence: it was all a bit strenuous, and a touch of complacent self-importance was never far away. Reading him in bulk, one registers a somewhat heavy, upholstered, Second Empire feel to much of his prose. It wasn’t, to put it mildly, marked by playfulness. Speaking as the Voice of Reason and Science apparently doesn’t ...”

“... fatal. Since Cairo is Peter Lorre at his most flamboyant, you would have to be quite far gone in self-congratulation not to notice him. Spade has failed to understand that a corridor is less a space than a channel of communication through which people, things and messages pass in both directions. Mind the traffic.Roger Luckhurst’s ambitious and ...”

“... actual existence) and our long ordeal begin once more’. Steward visited Greenwich Village, the self-appointed centre of American gay life in the 1930s, but he felt little need to move there, the much mythologised rite recorded in most queer autobiographies then and now. Given Steward’s three hundred sexual encounters in Ohio, one wonders whether these ...”

“... In​ the 2014 independence referendum in Scotland, prudence, self-interest and the ministrations of Project Fear kept the Scottish electorate from succumbing to the over-optimistic prospectus presented by the SNP. Surely, David Cameron reckoned, the same formula would work again a mere two years later in the UK-wide Brexit referendum ...”

“... houses” in the invisible digital sphere. It is in inefficiency, experimentation, self-expression and often law-breaking that freedom and political self-representation can be found.’ As well as the new ethical questions raised by machine vision, Paglen is also interested in the way it troubles old ...”

“... two-hour battle with the ‘slave breaker’ Edward Covey as the most significant example of his self-mythologising. On Covey’s dilapidated farmstead, Blight writes, ‘Ishmael found his Ahab, the ultimate tyrant whose obsessions could never be tamed.’ But in trying to break the slave, Covey himself was broken. ‘I felt as I never felt ...”

“... that social ideals of body size and shape have generally been at some remove from the norm. One self-enforcing advantage of power and status has always been the ability to command a flattering reflection. If anyone thought that at 54 inches around the waist, Henry VIII was fat, they thought twice about saying so and in Holbein’s portraits of the king his ...”