“... chair; while terms like ‘splitting’, ‘scotomisation’ and ‘derealisation’ (mental self-blinding) slowly crept into Freud’s late vocabulary as he began to confront minds whose only recourse in the face of mental pain was to take flight from themselves. No surprise that such a conference should find itself brushing up against the worst of ...”

“... it presents the home as a redoubt against public danger but because it explores the impulse to self-impose a siege and accept a tightly monitored environment. All the more impressive, then, that it pushes back against the morbid and precautionary aspects of lockdown.It did no harm to the film’s reception that the insecurities induced by Covid were ...”

“... only the word ‘little’ is not a monosyllable). I find him browsing along the seam of self and world, like a painter, or like a European poet, not unlike Montale or Pasternak, the poets he most admired among his contemporaries. He was his own centre, and his life provided him with much of his material, but then I don’t see what else a poet is to ...”

“... yet elusive aspects of cultural change is the way certain ideals and arguments acquire an almost self-evident power at particular times, just as others come to seem irrelevant or antiquated and largely disappear from public debate. In the middle of the 18th century, to describe a measure as ‘displaying the respect that is due to rank’ was a commonplace ...”

“... Genet, Robbe-Grillet was now to be found in second-hand bookshops. Passionately anti-clerical, a self-confessed sadist, Robbe-Grillet had always relished his unofficial title, the ‘pope of the nouveau roman’, but now the joke was wearing thin: no one wants to lead a church without a congregation. His parting gesture was to preside over a black mass. He ...”

“... a love story. The real romance is not the one between Edwards and the extremely peculiar Hunter, a self-described ‘truth seeker’ and ‘old soul’ who needs to call her psychic guru back in California before she can decide whether to have Russian dressing with her Reuben sandwich. The love is between Young and Edwards, even though from the start it is ...”

“... women. When I think of their frequent beauty & grace & elegance & alertness, their cleverness & self-assistance (if it be simply in the matter of toilet) & compare them with English girls, living up to their necks among comforts & influences & advantages which have no place with us, my bosom swells with affection & pride. The name of his cousin Minny ...”

“... good health. That’s well known.’ ‘Is it? Right, let’s snatch him before he . . . self-deconstructs – isn’t that his word?’ I left lunch with four commissions – Cioran, Popper, Derrida and Gadamer – each paying £200. But I never wrote one of those obituaries. Other things got in the way. I have been trying to finish my PhD thesis ...”

“... his famous new colleagues: ‘a pleasure balanced, I think, by the pain of well-developed self-doubt – I rejoiced in being among their company.’ But there isn’t much reflection on this feeling, an all too common one among academics. The problem is not just that he fails to use his personal life as a prism to refract his times. The break-up of ...”

“... initiatives. By refusing to denounce Europe or immigration, Letwin was displaying the new style of self-presentation that began with Cameron’s election to the leadership. Letwin’s answer to the young woman also reflected a new strategy. ‘Over the last fifteen years,’ Francis Maude, the party chairman, told me last December, ‘we became a party very ...”

“... Johnson loved the play. But neoclassical principles generally demand clear form and order, and a self-evident morality, and these are choices that Hamlet has always been able to frustrate or violate. This restricted sense of the civilised re-emerged last century with Modernism, which looked for abstraction in works of art, emphasising openness to ...”

“... The church clock is striking five when we turn back, the waterfall now illuminated under its own self-generated power, the same power that once lit the whole village, and I suppose one day might have to do so again. 8 January. I spend a lot of time these days just tidying up and today I start on my notebooks. Around 1964 I took to carrying a notebook in my ...”

“... but as an unending nightmare. Not least among the reasons was that a black man of unerring self-discipline and caution, bipartisan to a fault, should have provoked such ferocious white resistance – fanned by the man who questioned the validity of his birth certificate and then succeeded him as president. This most eloquent champion of ...”

“... their behaviour over the Polish border), their obsession with themselves, a strong inclination to self-pity, and a longing to be liked.’ Other qualities discussed included German ‘angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complex, sentimentality’. Powell later said he regretted writing this down, not because it didn’t ...”

“... one day repeat such an experiment with another race.’ In an extraordinary gesture of radical self-abnegation – not the type of gesture for which he is best known – Freud was willing to sacrifice humanity, as we might say these days, to save the planet. Later, in the 1930s, with the next war on the horizon, he again speculated that the human race was ...”