“... when he was 14, and largely pursued his own interests from then on. Precocity was key to his self-image. When he was 12, he created the Info Network, an online encyclopedia launched two years before Wikipedia, and soon after he was part of the RSS working group; for months, no one knew they were dealing with a teenager. His lack of deference helped to ...”

“... and Trump employees were quickly uncovered by Cosmopolitan and other periodicals devoted to self-image. It is estimated that two-thirds of Americans are overweight.Diplomats Seventy-five former career ambassadors and retired State Department officials, who traditionally have no party affiliations, have signed a letter calling Trump ‘ignorant’ and ...”

“... on her and waiting for her. What was I waiting for? Waiting for her to step into her self or step out of her invalid self. Waiting for her to take the voyage out of her gloom.’ Something needs to change. Hot Milk takes its epigraph from Cixous: ‘It’s up to you to break the old circuits.’ For Sofia, that ...”

“... died he did too.But there was much fun on the way. Propertius can be perky, mock-solemn, solemn, self-savaging, other-savaging, swirlingly mythological, brutally bathetic, hot, cold, drunk, vicious, silly, over-learned, stone-cold sober and dazzlingly obscure. As the elegies proceed the elegant form of Cynthia, a goddess in Book 1, largely vanishes into the ...”

“... years on the throne, the queen had, according to Batten, committed treason against herself – a self-inflicted lèse-majesté. In another age, the Tower of London would be dusting down Thomas More’s old cell for him. But it would be unfair to dismiss Batten as a know-nothing stirrer, though often his behaviour does seem to fit that description: calling ...”

“... on 27 January 1756. Leopold, Wolfgang’s father, was a composer and violinist who had recently self-published a violin primer which quickly became a standard text. His promotion to the position of deputy Kapellmeister in the court of Count Leopold Anton von Firmian, the prince-archbishop of Salzburg – he led the orchestra when the Kapellmeister was ...”

“... deeds. When one turns from the professed philosophy to the policies, what is left of Macron’s self-proclaimed ‘progressivism’? In place of ideology we find a banal pragmatism derived from a combination of neoliberalism and authoritarianism, and projected by means of impressive PR skills, on the international stage especially. From Thatcher to ...”

“... bear little resemblance to the sponsored summits of today, where female entrepreneurs disseminate self-help platitudes from hands-free microphones. ‘Women were forever summiting, endlessly climbing with ropes around the waist, wielding pitons,’ Wolitzer writes. ‘The summits were about ambitious topics, such as, recently, leadership … the foundation ...”

“... it ‘ruinously flawed’. The usual explanation for the split between O’Nolan’s all-out self-confidence and his air of anxious insecurity – a mixture of ‘fretfulness and swagger’, as Maebh Long puts it – is that it was a consequence of his failure to find a publisher for The Third Policeman. By 1941, when he turned thirty, O’Nolan had ...”

“... where prisoners could work towards an NVQ. There were fall-offs in the rates of suicide and self-harm. But the prison was still overcrowded, understaffed and unsafe. A new floor-to-ceiling window was repeatedly smashed and finally boarded up. At the beginning of the 1970s there were 800 women in prison nationwide; by 1980 there were 1500. When Greenham ...”

“... for the good of the trade, acknowledging his depravity so as to indicate their own capacity for self-regulation. Instead, they closed ranks. They understood that the reputation of the British slave trade was at stake, that it would be difficult to separate the charges against Kimber from the larger allegations the abolitionists had made against the ...”

“... heard of a “Bo-da” meeting, nobody ever heard of suicide hotlines, nobody ever heard of any self-help programme – wallowing in self-pity with only a touch of stylish irony was the only idea. And I loved it for its fearless wrongness.’That was the year of her accident. Babitz refused to address her brush with ...”

“... they made a happy threesome, with Meredith posing for a picture of the poet Chatterton, dead after self-poisoning. Judging by Wallis’s amiable teddy-bearish persona in his letters (he lived into old age, became a significant collector of Italian and Islamic ceramics and adored his son, Felix), we might wager it was the dissatisfied wife who made the first ...”

“... concentrate on gun safety and environmental awareness – and those who bought their guns for self-defence, and had no interest in ever leaving Washington. You know who won.One of the things Johnson wanted, and blamed the NRA for not letting him get, was a national registry of all the guns in the country. NRA lobbying was still in its infancy, but when ...”

“... Sarah Lucas and I walked the streets in search of more drink after Damien Hirst told Will Self to ‘crack a fucking smile’. I think I sang with Milli Vanilli. Life coaches will tell you that nothing interesting happens after three o’clock in the morning. They’re wrong. I nearly died in an experimental-plane accident with John Denver. People ...”