“... that no analogy between a natural cycle and man’s life is very satisfactory, since man, in his self-consciousness, is all too aware that, for him, the cycle will not start again. All of the great commonplaces on this subject, from ‘As the generations of leaves, so are the generations of men’ to ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’, depend for their ...”

“... strike us as being akin to a diary of Picasso’s imaginary life, with all the vividness, and the self-indulgence, that might suggest. The ‘347 Series’, as it has come to be known, is surely also the most impressive achievement of the artist’s late period. The prints have none of the solemn lyricism which is so remarkable in the Vollard Suite, but they ...”

“... electricity and hypnotism) and with drugs; both saw themselves as caged elemental beings – ‘self-incaged’ in Coleridge’s honest phrase to Godwin in 1802. Both had views on monogamy, loving women other than their wives. Whether Shelley, if he had lived, would have lost his charm, as Coleridge did, we cannot know. That charm, anyway, we have to take ...”

“... into a single Muslim country when he wrote the book, relying instead on Orientalist cliché. A self-serving fantasy of the exotic East as foil to Western superiority took deep root. It even permeates letters I have read in provincial archives in the north of England in which happy British women congratulate themselves on having escaped the fate of their ...”

“... stance was not that of a historian so much as a ‘public intellectual’, a brilliant enemy of self-delusion garnished with theoretical jargon, with the short temper of the natural polemicist, an independent and fearless critical commentator on world affairs. He seemed all the more original and radical for having been a fairly orthodox defender of the ...”

“... way as Milton’s Comus, say, or Handel and Gay’s Acis and Galatea. The etchings are elegant, self-conscious, mostly light-hearted things, even when their subject matter is riotous or worse. In plate 56, for example, done on 30 March 1933, the elderly sculptor and his model, both naked and plumped up on pillows, gaze a bit vacantly at a marble the ...”

“... make any friends doing so. For six years, August, Siri and their children kicked around Europe in self-imposed exile, with 21 changes of residence and not a little discomfort. Although by now he had many fans and enough books and stage productions to make him famous, Strindberg still had difficulties with publishers and theatres, not to mention constant ...”

“... in such a system: this is the ‘diachronic dimension’. Saussure’s great Mémoire, which he self-published in 1878 and which inferred the system of word structure in the reconstructed proto-Indo-European language, had in large part already demonstrated the ‘structural’ approach to linguistic form and its historical transformation that he never ...”

“... solid basis for these institutions, at least one that is not founded in violence, the violence of self-authorised power. It is this paradox that intrigues these theorists: that the beginnings of sovereignty and law seem to lie in an exception to the just rule that they otherwise purport to represent and to secure. They puzzle over this conundrum for what it ...”

“... The behaviour of the Conservatives we could expect; their opposition was as much instinctive as self-interested. They are the party of the constitution, after all. But the sight of those clapped-out Labour warhorses (who had had no trouble voting for reformed systems in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales) enthusiastically supporting a Tory-funded campaign ...”

“... fashions to copy; and the crane operator, the intermediary between the world and the port, is a self-taught naturalist. In his cabin there is a library, as well as a football – ‘like the orb of a strange planet’ – that bounced from the deck of a moored British ship in 1904. Korea’s scabby head reminds everyone of a globe, inspiring ...”

“... requirement that all academic research have an ‘impact’ on the economy; the transformation of self-governing communities of scholars into mega-businesses, staffed by a highly-paid executive class, who oversee the professors, or middle managers, who in turn rule over an ill-paid and often temporary or part-time proletariat of junior lecturers and research ...”

“... When Herzog refuses, Ganna implies that she and he don’t get on, not because they’re too self-absorbed to listen to each other, but because they possess two different shades of literary soul, hers bohemian, his neat, Austrian and aspirational: ‘Bitterly, she called me a bourgeois who didn’t have the courage to try out in his life what he was ...”

“... say, but they said it was about time. I was vice-president of my class and happy to be my real self.’ Maasch’s organisation has published an advice pamphlet for trans teens: there are tips for transgirls on selecting the right bra, and information for transboys on binders and packers; everyone wants to know how to come out to friends. But the ...”

“... lets in mistakes every so often, only to call attention to the façade. Bieber is by now the most self-conscious celebrity in the world, partly because of the extensive record of his life, refreshed every few minutes on Twitter, YouTube, blogs, mainstream media and the rest of the internet to which he’s owed his fame from the start. Wayne takes a slapstick ...”