“... notaries, now to be found in the city archives: pairs of dice; a bare bottom; a note-to-self: ‘All that a man has is hanging by a fine thread, and the most secure things can collapse quite suddenly.’ Merchants surrounded themselves with fine things. Silks could be draped and handled, jewels hung round the neck. And yet this wealth was secured by ...”

“... should have been the high point of her career.’ We don’t begrudge her these moments of self-pity, but McGregor makes less effort to help us understand the couple’s son, Frank. The only time he visits Doc in hospital, he struts around ‘doing something on his phone’ and then abruptly leaves for ‘a work thing’. He has an ...”

“... or limits about the difference between right or wrong’. As for the young man: was this self-destruction, or did the system destroy him? Either way, this is the habitat that produces the great minds behind the some of the world’s most sophisticated modern spying weapons. Now imagine how these cyber-geniuses feel when they leave the military and ...”

“... geographies written by scholars whose main source was the Bible. (The evangelical adventurer and self-publicist John MacGregor found this a problem on a canoe trip down the Jordan in 1868.) Aspirant surveyors quickly discovered that they needed the co-operation of local tribal leaders, some of whom collaborated in the hope that it would encourage a British ...”

“... Lionel Trilling wrote in his journal of his ‘intense disgust with my official and public self’. One of the attractions of this language, if you can bear the tension, is that people can talk about unhappiness; and denial, even while fully in place as denial, can be elaborately discussed. The word ‘fear’ runs through Robins’s book like an ...”

“... Jackself borrows its title, a poem about the discordant moments of being the same person. ‘Soul, self; come, poor Jackself,’ Hopkins wrote, ‘I do advise/You, jaded, let be; call off thoughts awhile.’ The second epigraph comes from one of the most famous anonymous ballads, ‘Tom O’Bedlam’, to which Jackself returns at the close, with a song in ...”

“... remained in Rome that year is unclear, but they supported Constantine’s rival for power, the self-proclaimed emperor Maxentius, who ruled there. Crossing the Alps at speed in late summer, Constantine shattered Maxentius’ field armies in the north Italian plain, then marched on his outnumbered garrison at Rome. (De la Bédoyère gets that detail ...”

“... issued a warrant for his arrest. But he refused to return to Paris and instead wrote a lengthy self-justification asserting his patriotism and loyalty to the revolution, then crossed the frontier into Austrian territory. The Assembly rewarded him with the label of émigré and ordered the confiscation of his property. Jailed by the Austrians, he found ...”

“... of God’s mercy – will the monk attain the humility required for salvation. This posture of self-condemnation undergirds the memento mori tradition, a subset of death-facing literature typified by Hoccleve’s ‘Lerne to Die’. In the Body and Soul poems, as in those terse memorial inscriptions where the dead address the living (‘what I am, you ...”

“... Fort’s very British mind – Eton and BalIiol – doesn’t wander easily to excavations of the self but rather to ruminations about history and class. ‘I like to picture Prior More of Worcester on a fine summer’s morning in, say, 1521,’ he writes, as he sets off on his bike to find the original commissioned ponds, a botched journey which nonetheless ...”

“... years at home I had seen only their worst side & now I am seeing a splendid side of courage & self sacrifice for an ideal, that no woman would better.’ Class mattered here, too. Before the war, women doctors had little opportunity to treat male patients and were confined to specialties such as gynaecology, obstetrics and paediatrics. As the ...”

“... speeches after the House reconvened was given by Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska. Sasse, a self-described ‘history nerd’ who has a PhD from Yale, admitted that ‘it was ugly today’:But you know what? It turns out that when something is ugly talking about beauty isn’t just permissible, talking about beauty is obligatory at a time like ...”

“... well, but even so there’s been a dramatic reduction in cases. However, one-off testing of a self-selecting population will have at best a modest effect. Systematic approaches with regular testing are much more likely to work. A variety of such approaches have been employed. At the Francis Crick Institute we test everyone individually every week. It’s ...”

“... where he ate only salad and grains’. The endless rumours about their relationship brought on self-loathing, and Springora pretty much stopped going to school. ‘I was afraid of people’s glances, afraid of bumping into someone I knew … I clung to the walls, took ridiculous detours along the least populated streets.’ One day when Matzneff was in the ...”

“... most members are well-heeled professionals with conventional tastes and ambitions, and a tinge of self-delusion. For Sampson, the significant fact about the big clubs of the 1960s was that they no longer fulfilled their Victorian function of bringing classes and interest groups together for a social purpose. They had joined the dignified rather than the ...”