“... Auxerre is an uncomfortable place for a Greek god. Dionysus is no longer his old bacchanalian self:With all the regular beauty of a pagan god, he has suffered after a manner of which we must suppose pagan gods incapable. It was as if one of those fair, triumphant beings had cast in his lot with the creatures of an age later than his own, people of larger ...”

“... I go. I come. I delve. I piss. I drool. I spit.’ His pursuit of casual sex can seem excessively self-interested, but Dustan was also deeply embedded in a community. Names of friends, bars and nightclubs conjure a closed circuit where everyone knows everyone and partners are passed from person to person: ‘I have a friend who put his two hands around his ...”

“... pit bulls, twin heads wobbling in the window. Gold chains, leather hats: pumped to the limits of self-parody, the bosses in their glitzed company limo look like snuff-film extras. The wretched Alsatian slinks off to sniff at cigarette packets and to pee on a few steps. In the old days, apparently, around 1985, the drugs were carried inside the collars of the ...”

“... foreign clerics were only too pleased to work inside the royal fold, where their distinction was self-evident. It also gave grounds for the aggrandising notion that philosophers supplied kings with wisdom – as Aristotle had Alexander.The​ second half of the 15th century was dominated by Ripley, the canon of an Augustinian priory in Yorkshire, whose ...”

“... more or less victorious. The diaries he left behind are melancholy, desultory and remorselessly self-recriminating, consisting in large part of resolutions, inevitably broken, to rise early, study hard and control himself. Yet Johnson was also a convivial, energetic, witty man, the cure for whose weakness (as he said himself) was company. The drive to ...”

“... America, and I decided to go back and rent a place in Kentucky. But I often felt uncomfortable and self-conscious. When I went into stores with a mask on I received angry stares, even though there were signs stating that masks should be worn. This struck me as worth writing about, but I didn’t. I just stopped wearing my mask. It was election year and Central ...”

“... an interview with a successful entrepreneur with a public-school education and a charmingly self-deprecating manner who has built a niche business purveying high-end furniture, posh chocolate or some other reassuringly expensive indicator of taste.The authors assume that this wealth elite has ‘real power’ because it combines ‘positional power and ...”

“... to focus on an activity so closely that they lose awareness of time, external surroundings and self-consciousness. Such experiences become autotelic, as the boundaries between self and activity fade.’ When, win or lose, Charlie and I reunite after a tournament game, he has the dazed look of a scuba diver resurfacing ...”

“... class on physics; elementary particles are infinitesimal, but the universe is infinite; Kana is a self-contained hamlet in forested Thuringia, but it is subject to the encroachment of violent outside forces. Herr Köhler runs a rooftop weather station, from which he gathers meteorological data on behalf of the townspeople and analyses ‘data from the ...”

“... what is called the ‘default mode network’, the interconnected brain areas responsible for self-reflection and self-consciousness, thinking about past and future, and for regulating other cerebral processes. The DMN, Sheldrake says, keeps a kind of order: ‘a schoolteacher in a chaotic classroom’. In neural ...”

“... as an ex-collaborator, laments Hitchcock’s ‘profound ignorance of human motivation’ as a self-evident weakness: but we could note that we’re all profoundly ignorant on this matter, and that the mysteriously expressive surface of the film actor’s face is an appropriate medium for this truth.The making of films, an extended process needing a large ...”

“... three years earlier. Pnina Lahav writes in her new biography that Bluma and her daughters ‘were self-conscious about looking like beggars: unclean, unkempt, and exhausted’. Not long after they arrived in the US, they watched Moshe marching with his fellow trade unionists on Labour Day. Tzipke was terrified by the sight of mounted police: ‘It’s the ...”

“... rebellion against Julius Caesar in the late 50s BC. Vercingetorix is written up in Caesar’s own self-serving account of the Gallic War as a traitor and Gallic nationalist, who was resoundingly outmanoeuvred by Roman tactics at the Battle of Alesia; he surrendered to Caesar and was packed off to Rome, to be killed several years later as part of the ...”

“... that populate ordinary thinking about the mind: beliefs, pain, consciousness, free will, the self. He sought to reconcile these aspects of the mind with the scientific story, to show how they can be integrated with such things as neural pathways carrying information, molecules moving according to mechanistic laws, the fundamental particles of atomic ...”

“... main objection to Whitehall secrecy is not ethical but practical. Obsessional secrecy is self-defeating. If the British media are fixated on spookery – Douglas Hurd once observed that journalists would get excited by a blank sheet of paper if it was stamped ‘Secret’ – more openness would divert their energy towards hunting out the everyday ...”