“... inwards at herself, but never outwards at other people. As a result, she appears both stupid and self-centred, and the most disagreeable attribute he gives her is a perverse puritanism: she has contempt for the normal pleasures of food and drink, a contempt for the chattering and sociable members of her own sex. Penelope Betjeman is kind to her, but ‘far ...”

“... The brain, sick or healthy, is cast in the role of authoritarian ruler, while the rest of the self (‘I had begun to realise, through a combination of instinct and insight, that I was not my brain’) agitates like a band of sans-culottes or dissident Sixties students. ‘No ... it’s the normal brain that’s really damaged. Having a brain – that’s ...”

“... been, to the women he has slept with, to the houses he has lived in, to Baby Becky and, not at all self-pityingly, to his old, slowly hazing-out disappearing self. For all his appetites and misdemeanours, Harry is understandable and, if understood, forgivable. He is a lens or prism, a middling man who serves his creator by ...”

“... the parties choose ‘rationally’, as Rawls puts it, which means on the basis of intelligent self-interest. However, behind the veil, they do not know what their particular interests are, so everyone’s self-interest has to be stylised in terms of a set of all-purpose or ‘primary’ goods – notably, liberty, money ...”

“... know that beneath all exteriors lie subterranean streams and caverns where the private, unknowable self contradicts the stated desires and achievements of the visible life. A biography, these days, must be a tale of the unexpected. Wouldn’t modern readers feel cheated to find that Antonia White and A.A. Milne were wise and devoted parents, or that Larkin ...”

“... the rather dinky, miniaturist feel of that term – prefers to style it, with characteristic self-deprecation, ‘a very short novel’. Either way, the text takes up less than a hundred pages, and does little to dispel an impression of slightness – in volume terms, at least – in his fictional oeuvre. He has, of course, written a great many other ...”

“... as that painting – so claims the novelist Dan Brown, incorrectly – is an ‘androgynous’ self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, Moss’s ‘gamine look’ has a similar ‘sexual ambivalence’. Susannah Frankel, a fashion editor at the Independent, has made the same comparison: ‘Kate Moss is a modern-day Mona Lisa. Although at times she might appear ...”

“... the remarkable success that it did – and continues to do. It certainly trades on the archly self-proclaimed nostalgia of its title, and on the wry vista it offers onto a lost world, through the childhood recollections of an elderly woman (Raverat was well over sixty by the time the manuscript was finished). And it includes a handful of brilliantly told ...”

“... must have suspected that there was more to this than meets the eye. Was Catullus parodying his self-importance and the orotund symmetries of his prose? Would he be immortalised as the sort of person who would swallow something this bald? Or were these just paranoid imaginings? Modern readers are in much the same situation, not sure whether we are in on the ...”

“... and each other as endowed with certain inalienable rights. Not merely is this true: it is self-evidently true (and you cannot readily get truer than that). Nozick himself keeps his cards close to his chest on the matter of what (if anything) does make his initial claim true. But it is a safe inference that his views on the question diverge from those ...”

“... life, which is unsatisfying for both parties because Carmel is relentlessly practical and calls self-reflection having ‘too much imagination’. Felim is bad, but none of the novel’s male characters are much to write home about. Nell’s university friend Mal is flaky and given to disappearing acts; her housemate Stuart leaves his washing in the ...”

“... shunned solidarity with fellows such as Nussbaum, joined the NSDAP in an act of uncritical self-betrayal, quit painting (to become a brewery executive) and was content for his old work to be exhibited in several editions of the Great German Art Exhibition, the state’s corrective to the celebrated and better attended Degenerate Art Exhibition.But no ...”

“... empirical truth. Aristotle was a pioneer, perhaps, in what I believe to be the commonest form of self-deception in science: the kind of attachment to a dearly loved hypothesis that predisposes us (yes, all of us) to attach a special weight to observations that square with and thus uphold our pet hypotheses, while finding reasons for disregarding or attaching ...”

“... advising us on our best sexual behaviour (usually called maturity, or mental health or a decentred self). It is indeed, dismaying how quickly psychoanalysis has become the science of the sensible passions; as though its aim was to make people more intelligible to themselves rather than to realise how strange they are. When psychoanalysis makes too much ...”

“... forms, and by seeking individually and collectively to restrain it by means of a philosophy of self-control and a culture of indirection and discretion, at the high price of acquiring a ‘recognisable preferred neurotic style ... obsessional-compulsive neurosis’ (aggression makes you nervous). It would be hard to conceive a more ambitious historical ...”