“... 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 ...”

“... end of the play Arthur declares: ‘I am no author of my history.’ The play genially hands out self-conscious chuckles, sometimes even without nudging you in the ribs as it does so. Accompanying the play are two contesting sets of notes. One set is ascribed to an earnest Shakespearean scholar called Roland Verre, whose name implies that in him scholarly ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the cognitive science programme at Yale, sees her two disciplines as mutually reinforcing, in the self-declared spirit of Aristotle and Hume. The cognitive sciences, she argues, shed light not only on various first-order questions in philosophy (especially those in philosophy of mind and action), but also on how traditional armchair philosophy, pace the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... anything criminal, and he wasn’t charged. Still, the local authorities don’t look kindly on self-styled clerics who turn up in the country, particularly when they meddle in local affairs, and Awlaki ended up in a dungeon in the political security prison in Sana’a. This prison spell was a gift from Allah, and bound Awlaki much more tightly to his ...”

“... of historians being content merely to stick one source after another, now seems very largely a self-serving myth. It did not require the birth of narratology or the return to fashion of ‘grand narrative’, to realise that historical narration is always selective and always posing questions about the evidence. No history – not even the most austere ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”