“... it back together again. Just fifteen months after his diagnosis, having considered then rejected self-referral to Dignitas (‘a package of medical costs, funeral expenses and official fees would cost 10,500 Swiss francs – approximately £7700 – plus airfare’), he signed up for aHSCT.Metamorphosis has an unusual structure.It begins with Chapter 42 ...”

“... of the lesbian romance. The matron, new to England from Australia, is not frail or consumptive but self-possessed and butch: when she looks in the bathroom mirror, wearing a binder and sleeveless tee, she sees a strong jaw and brow passed down from grandfather to father. At the boarding school on a one-year placement, she owes no allegiance to the world of ...”

“... in the essential inequality of the African. A very striking portrait of Williams, quite possibly a self-portrait, hangs in the V&A, acquired by the museum in the 1920s from Long’s descendants. New research on Williams and the portrait is being undertaken, and new plans are being made for its display. As a Windrush tribute it is currently exhibited alongside ...”

“... The war​ in Ukraine has prompted a wave of self-critical reassessment among Western scholars of the former Soviet Union. Have studies of the USSR unthinkingly reproduced the logic of a Russian imperial project? Do we need to look at the Soviet period through the lens of ‘decolonisation’? The German historian Karl Schlögel’s own process of introspection began in 2014, with the annexation of Crimea and the Kremlin’s stoking of rebellion in Donbas, which he describes in the preface to The Soviet Century as the ‘drop that made my cup run over ...”

“... agreed to be the most French and the most rural of geniuses. In 1940 he constructed a solid self-portrait from blocky patches of earthy colours. He also adopted Cézanne’s two great subjects: fruit on a simple table with cloth in mountainous profile behind, and trees with branches that lock into the pattern of distant fields and rocky ...”

“... prospectus, or will it mean whatever the US decides best serves its purposes? There is something self-indulgent about all these declarations of new eras and pages turned. A sense, perhaps, that the British state is chasing apparitions. The stream of definitive strategic documents never ends. The government will soon publish another National Security ...”

“... through the pictures offered by Mateus Araújo and Julien d’Abrigeon. Famous slogans about the self are repeated by Godard. ‘I think therefore I am’ becomes a way of ‘deciphering the world, but on the basis of an attentive inspection of its own representations’. ‘Je est un autre’ becomes ‘a recurring quotation’, even if Godard ‘virtually ...”

“... much younger and more vulnerable now that he’s no longer the narrator-hero – and reveals a self-interested reason for trying to keep him alive for the rest of the book: ‘Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away. Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?’ In Twain’s novel, Huck and Jim separate when their raft is hit by ...”

“... eventually, and provides a succinct explanation, but only after what seems an absurd display of self-doubt and overthinking. The repetition and rethinking are consequences of the training process developed by DeepSeek and give the model high scores on problem-solving benchmarks. But there is still something unsettling about it: if a student or colleague ...”

“... inundation by a ‘veritable deluge’ of complaints, ranging from the relatively commonplace and self-explanatory, such as claustrophobia, to the downright idiosyncratic, such as triskaidekaphobia, or fear of the number 13. Twenty years later, in his Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud was to respond with similar impatience to the list of phobias ...”

“... to break the law in this instance? I felt her disappointment, as I saw it, tarnishing my heroic self-image. Twenty-two years later, I’m still not sure whether it was the right thing to do, although history has at least shown that my anger was justified. One thing I do know, though: it wasn’t terrorism.Three weeks after the protest, my mother, who had ...”

“... the Strong’. When it came to political and military matters, however, Augustus’s appetite for self-advertisement had predictably unhappy consequences. Only three years after succeeding his brother as elector of Saxony in 1694, he bid for and won the crown of the Commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania. For the rest of his life, he would struggle to keep hold ...”

“... violent hatred of the other, false nostalgia for stolen pasts, the isolated pursuit of self-advantage. What does Reeves lose by not being bolder? She is constrained by her own fiscal rules and Starmer’s fragility. It’s true that she is in a tougher spot than many of her predecessors. She can’t borrow at zero cost, an opportunity squandered ...”

“... small part in criminal justice, they nevertheless represent and embody it. Professional judges and self-selected magistrates will not command the same respect and legitimacy. Judges used to be venerated, but now they are vilified. Imagine if a judge-only trial of an alleged prolific sex-offender or child killer resulted in an acquittal. ‘Enemies of the ...”

“... of 823 francs. Does any publisher do this nowadays? It would certainly add to a writer’s normal self-doubts.The custom was for a publisher to buy a book outright, gaining permission to exploit it for a set number of years, and then, if it was successful and the author agreed, would buy another term for a second down payment. If the book proved a sudden ...”