“... on Alcatraz. San Francisco prides itself on being a liberal place to live, but the urge to self-destruction saw the bridge and recognised destiny. There are still disputes about whether to build a ‘suicide barrier’ on the bridge or whether to leave the decision to the person who spends an hour gazing at the water below. That’s where the drama ...”

“... think. But no: his widow continues to abide by her wedding vows, and in a far from happy ending, self-imposed constancy prevails over love. Where is the biographical resonance? Nicolas Sárközy de Nagy-Bócsa does have a vaguely aristocratic (Hungarian) background, and he did recently marry a woman of reputedly rare beauty. It was, however, wife number ...”

“... consolation. Science’s chilling reports on the material world were not what the spiritual self, hungry for order, purpose and transcendent value, wanted to hear. At some point in the 19th century, the natural sciences became more or less synonymous with knowledge as such, and the arts were faced with a choice. On the one hand, they could simply refuse ...”

“... oddly social-anthropological character of both these accounts: evocations of a way of life that self-consciously represented the values of solidarity and community, and that required a measure of continuity – and thus a belief in the continued viability of the pits – to function at all. Francis Beckett and David Hencke quote one journalist’s ...”

“... to hang themselves in 2003 alone – authorities log these under the heading ‘manipulative self-injurious behaviour’. Fletcher and Stover are worried by the rapid erosion of the Army Field Manual ‘guiding rule’ that no interrogator should use a technique he or she would not want used on a US soldier. Yet, as they recall early on, many of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Britain as a crushed, impoverished ex-colony’. In one of several moments of pained self-revelation, Stewart confesses a strong identification with Gildas, ‘for his deep pessimism about Britain and his painful investment in its fate, his consciousness of his own failings in a world unmoored’. The kingdom of Rheged proved short-lived. By ...”

“... make sense of this transnational governmental network through the inherited language of collective self-government. The question is not whether the sovereign people sleeps but whether contemporary governmental practice can still be explained through the conceptual language of sovereignty. The question is not whether sovereignty is lost when Parliament hands ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... status. Leiris thought of them as ‘juxtaposed, rather than grouped’, but they have the quiet self-consciousness of kin gathered for a family occasion. Genet was intrigued by something even more striking when he was hanging out in Giacometti’s studio. The finished stand-alone pieces, he records, underwent a subtle change whenever the artist was at work ...”

“... a constant feature of those years, even decades. His life was one continuing round of obstinacy, self-conceit, sexual frustration, shyness and crises of faith. Then in 1902 he met and married Ada Vilstrup, and adopted the name Nolde from his native village; he and Ada moved to the Baltic island of Alsen; in 1904 he had his first solo exhibitions, in Leipzig ...”

“... separate to themselves, an embodiment of Otherness.’ ‘Otherness’ here, as conceived by this self-important TV don, is a term belonging to sociology or his daughter’s English lectures. In the novel it is a matter of lived experience. White characters constantly ‘other’ black characters: a fellow student shouts at Carole that she’s ‘so ...”

“... 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 ...”