“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”