“... the centre of the brain, the pineal gland. A hundred years later, the physician, philosopher and self-declared ‘mechanical materialist’ Julien Offray de la Mettrie dismissed Descartes’s dualistic waystation in his manifesto L’Homme machine. He argued that mental processes were no more than manifestations of the workings of the brain, a heretical view ...”

“... such people began to threaten their previously undisputed position of authority. Their ideal was a self-sufficient landed estate, with flocks, cattle and arable land, farmed by nameless workers who got protection in time of war as a quid pro quo. But from the seventh century BCE onwards, colonialism, with the consequent expansion of trade and horizons, led to ...”

“... of power relations between an empire’s margins and its centre. For all his eloquence and self-consciousness, Prince’s would-be Leonardo da Vinci can’t help letting slip that he views his supposed patron as a ‘tyrant’. Nor can he obscure the fact that he is lamenting, in the most sophisticated terms, the humiliating paradoxes of his status as ...”

“... exotic voyages to the Far East, pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and European journeys undertaken for self-betterment, anticipating the 18th-century Grand Tour. What Legassie calls ‘the prestige economy of long-distance knowledge’ made bestsellers of such works as Marco Polo’s Divisament dou monde, written with Rustichello da Pisa – a composer of ...”

“... in. Snipers’ pillboxes and signs warning of unexploded mines remained, and so did the now-fading self-importance that comes to a place taught to think of itself as being on the front line of imminent invasion. Above the high-tide line, the beach was a broad ridge of hard-to-walk-on pebbles, where a cluster of scruffy boats was drawn up beside the twin huts ...”

“... more than the women for a day’s work; their solution was to pool their wages. ‘In their self-governing groups,’ Smith writes, ‘students could practise the complementary virtues of self-reliance and mutual support that had been held up to them as ideals since childhood but that eluded them in official ...”

“... Russians, might benefit, but he didn’t think it would do much for the Swiss, who were lousy ‘self-observers … or self-devourers, as their saying goes’. They needed prompting. Instead of the talking cure for his sanatorium patients, he opted for art therapy. He also spent years on a study of Swiss phallic ...”

“... because of its anticipated practical effects, and because it seemed to fit with his rather self-conscious defiance of convention and religion. He was also responding to the industrial conflicts of early 20th-century America. A speech given by the labour organiser Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at a silk-workers’ strike in Paterson, New Jersey in 1913 ...”

“... in the middle of The End, the sixth and last volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s titanic work of self-description. At around page 482, the book swerves away from scenes of family and social life, and plunges, like a car crashing through a safety barrier, into a prolonged reflection on Adolf Hitler. For 360 pages Knausgaard discusses Hitler’s youthful ...”

“... if you prefer that option, it’s easy to know what to vote: Conservative. Anything else would be self-defeating. But if you want the alternative, it’s harder to know what to do, because in some places, especially where the Lib Dems have the best chance of defeating the Tories, a Labour vote would be self-defeating. So we ...”

“... Abraham Lincoln​ , memorialised as a child of the frontier, self-made man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who hated slavery, the pragmatic politician driven solely by ambition, the tyrant who ran roughshod over the Constitution, and the indecisive leader buffeted by events he could not control ...”

“... from various angles, doggedly, querulously, concedingly, mournfully, its grip blunted by Wood’s self-denying ordinance against naming any living art historian. Thus at the close of his survey, he conducts the reader down into a glum dark place. His dungeon is shot through, however, with mystery lights:The historians of the contemporary are devoted to art ...”

“... Democracy inclines towards toxic populism, just as Plato warned. Capitalism inclines towards self-serving oligarchy, just as Marx predicted. Each works only if the other is there.Wolf would like to think that democracy and capitalism suit each other, despite their differences. Both rest on an idea of individual human agency. In a capitalist economy ...”

“... Mantel’s Wolf Hall is a historically more credible heretic-burner bent on martyrdom. More’s self-flagellation and habitual wearing of a hair shirt now look less like the pure tokens of virtue they did to his hagiolaters. To the charge that More had an unnatural fondness for torture (when John Tewkesbury, a London leather merchant and Protestant, was ...”

“... the truth.’ He’s ninety years old and beginning to lose his memory and has scattered notes to self about his daughter all over his apartment, ‘as if sheets of paper were suddenly sprouting from the floor’. Johannes’s daughter is unimpressed. ‘The malevolent and idolatrous passion for the truth … When it is useless. The stubborn frivolity of the ...”