“... may well have developed your symptoms himself. Hypochondria is not – or not only – a form of self-indulgence. It is also a form of pathological empathy. Charles Darwin wanted to be a doctor, but was too sensitive to human suffering. It is a worrying thought – worrying enough to raise the pulse rate – that nurses and doctors are an elite, ...”

“... Trolls​ are the self-styled pranksters of the internet, a subculture of wind-up merchants who will say anything they can to provoke unwary victims, then delight in the outrage that follows. When Mitchell Henderson, a 12-year-old boy from Minnesota, killed himself in 2006, trolls descended on his MySpace page, where his friends and relatives were posting tributes ...”

“... of her dancing on stage, with snapshots of her among friends and admirers, the show recaptures the self-knowingly playful acrobatics and the heart-stopping clothed elegance of this unthreatening sexual being, a femme vitale but not fatale. How uncanny to find her exhibited in a space that normally serves as an auction house. Josephine Baker for sale: what is ...”

“... truth’. Rose is also compellingly readable on the Stevenson biography, and its bizarre trio of self-exculpating and condemnatory appendixes by three Plath ‘friends’. There was obviously something about Plath that stung people who knew her into frantic self-justification. Rose asks: ‘What it is on Plath’s part ...”

“... Safe as houses and translating freely, though completely lacking Heaney’s subtle self-recognitions, his response was lofty: ‘Comprehension.’ Then, perhaps aware of the self-serving in adequacy of the answer to someone he was using as informant/subject, he added: ‘and money.’ There was no possible ...”

“... Jessica has declined to help the Guinnesses with their book. It is hard not to moralise, in a self-righteous way, when confronted with the disastrous careers of the Fascist sisters, Unity and Diana. The Guinnesses are a solemn pair and have written a moralising book, from an extreme right-wing position. Jonathan Guinness has been chairman of the Monday ...”

“... Bertie Wooster would say, so the long day wore on, so to speak. Occasionally the text is in flat self-contradiction. Page 263 tells us that ‘Ireland was not a target’ for French invasion ‘in 1779’, but page 503 makes it clear that initially it was (although the author might, have added that ‘Edward Bancroft, the American diplomat’ suggested by ...”

“... Two original and accomplished works by Alasdair Gray, self-styled ‘Caledonian promover of intelligible sapience’, are published this month. Unlikely Stories, Mostly is copiously illustrated in a style which sometimes descends to coy greeting-card formalism – inanely grinning dogs, twinkling stars, nymphs with perfectly rounded breasts and perfectly circular nipples, muscular workers, a conquistador complete with Spanish moustache, an eastern scene composed of pointy pagodas ...”

“... nothing of real and permanent value. Cage was America’s best Dadaist, best Surrealist, best self-publicist, self-archivist, and its worst composer. He was a deeply playful and deluded man, whose project (he felt he had achieved it) was to ‘show the practicality of making works of art non-intentionally’, who ...”

“... remarkable,’ said the Telegraph of Out, and Punch thought that the author was so sure of her new self that she must belong to the school of Samuel Beckett. In Remake it’s this wise child she celebrates, and indeed she mischievously cites – from Jenny Diski writing in the London Review of Books, as it happens – a witty mock-theory about the ‘crucial ...”

“... not, in fact, own the ‘facts’ of his life, or of Plath’s: some of us might be said to be self-possessed, but none of us is in full possession of facts about ourselves beyond our reported date of birth, and – if we’re lucky – our parentage. In an essay in 1967 Hughes stated that ‘the struggle truly to possess his own experience, in other words ...”

“... wondering how to be true to herself, even (or perhaps especially) if she doesn’t quite have a self. AnnieLee lies about her past and says she doesn’t have a family. Sure, she’s got talent, but something is chasing her and giving her the fear, the reason, the drive. Even at this early stage in the narrative, you detect the clumsy fingers of a bad male ...”

“... by the civilised life.’ Maybe any such talk of ‘civilisation’ is liable to sound pompous and self-important, but the more we listen to ‘Uncle Wiz’, the more wistfully we recall his younger self who could be ‘silly like us’.Meeting the 50-year-old Auden, his undergraduate contemporary Richard Crossman ...”

“... Michael Fried, who is also a poet, has a dense, self-questioning, fervent prose style. Somewhat perversely he has, over the last three decades – that is, since his doctoral dissertation on Manet was printed as a special issue of Artforum in 1969 – put this prose to the service of art-historical scholarship. It might have been otherwise ...”

“... the evil – and, traditionally, the guilt – of rape is turned inward, but borne by some other self which is not the true self. She thinks that multiple-identity stories that deal not with splitting but with masquerading – having more than one self at one’s conscious disposal ...”