“... the defender? How come the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories can never be engaged in self-defence, while the Israeli army is always the defender?’ My friend Shay from the graphics department clarified matters for me: ‘If you go to the Gaza Strip and shoot people, you will be a terrorist. But when the army does it that is an operation to make ...”

“... think about it at all. A lot of Sunstein’s recent work has had this quality: scolding us for our self-righteousness and pointing out the human dimensions of various issues that we have failed to take rationally into account. In Worst-Case Scenarios, the scolding tone becomes more unpleasant when Sunstein confronts the critics of the US refusal to ratify the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Turner argues that Chaucer created a type of character new to English literature: one who is self-aware and gives the impression of revealing her thoughts and emotions. There were antecedents. Ovid’s Heroides, a collection of verse letters in the voices of such women as Penelope, Dido and Sappho, provided the basis for Chaucer’s own collection of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... books, Slotkin in A Great Disorder sees national myths as contested, evolving and sometimes self-contradictory. Thus the nationwide dissemination of the Lost Cause in the late 19th and early 20th centuries left space for the emergence of a more egalitarian vision. This, however, didn’t take hold until during and after the Second World War. Before ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a Jew, from a prominent New York Jewish family. People argued about whether his gift was an act of self-hatred or a wise guy’s last laugh. Judging from the reaction at the time, it didn’t occur to anyone that it was a matter of principle. And that included me. Sparks’s will, filed in New York County Surrogate’s Court, became a cause célèbre. The ...”

“... of socialist realism. Then came news of the Stalin trials and purges. Exercising a great deal of self-deception, some Surrealists, including Aragon, remained party members. Most of the others left; the proud Breton was further alienated when he was refused a speaking slot at the International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture in 1935. A chief ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... an object, reaches an emotional state in which the exclusive object of her psychic energy is the self’. There is something (more obvious than the words suggest) in that. In the world in which Jean Rhys grew up women were expected first to be pretty, then to flirt and finally to marry. But Mr Kennaway didn’t think she was pretty, Mr Gregg didn’t like ...”

“... The only foreshadowing of his political career seems to have been a propensity for theatrical self-fashioning. He’d learned from his mother that identity was, to some extent, elective – after all, she spoke with a ‘cut-glass English accent’ despite being entirely Californian. (She picked it up after watching Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady.) After ...”

“... character I know around this town’.) His treatment of his early partners shows how deeply this self- involvement bled into his private affairs. He was married first in 1964 to Larrine Sullivan, a college flame. Packer praises him for refusing the pleasures of the ‘vast brothel’ of South Vietnam as a result of his loyalty to her. He also tells us ...”