“... Security (Incapacity for Work) Bill, which comes into force this year. This system will use a self-assessment form – a singularly inappropriate method – to work out eligibility for the slightly higher benefit available to the mentally and physically disabled, but will judge psychological incapacity on what the MHF describes as ‘strikingly more ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... double agents. At Camp X in Toronto, MI6 officers instructed Americans ‘in the arts of sabotage, self-defence and secret codes’. In exchange, the FBI turned a ‘blind eye to British activities on US soil’. Ian Fleming, posted to Washington, didn’t take to Hoover – ‘a chunky enigmatic man with slope eyes and a trap of a mouth’. British ...”

“... any of the large forces that affect a life, without giving them totalising authority over one’s self?The unacknowledged debt to naturalism and the silent faith in determinism feel like the deep spiritual background to the novels produced by my generation. In some respects, we live in an era of unprecedented freedoms and scientific information, and yet the ...”

“... a marvellous child’ and a ‘little genius’, but the studio did little to nurture her self-esteem. They made her wear rubber discs to turn up the tip of her nose and removable tooth caps to fix her smile (these beauty rules were later referenced in A Star Is Born). They criticised her perfectly healthy teenage body until she starved herself enough ...”

“... to Burden’s Maine cottage for a month every summer. What Luce calls Brzezinski’s ‘ferocious self-promotion’ was paying off.In June 1966, Brzezinski took a job at the Policy Planning Council in the State Department, where he aimed to promote his peaceful engagement strategy. This was not a retreat from the pursuit of victory in the Cold War. Brzezinski ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the efforts of some of the Founding Fathers, but penal codes were dramatically revised and made self-consciously less bloody than those of the mother country. The Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibiting ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ is another sign of the Founding Fathers’ commitment to the idea that a new sort of liberal polity demanded ...”

“... a leak, came down the centre aisle, waiting at the end of a pew until someone made room, his self-effacing behaviour and downcast eyes proclaiming him a person of some consequence humbled by the circumstances in which he currently found himself and which might have been allegorically represented on a ceiling, say (although not one of his), as Fame ...”

“... and her determination to make her argument accessible to those without any legal training is a self-consciously political act. Her introduction promises that legal terms will be explained as needed and directs the reader in addition to a useful glossary of such terms at the back; only on a very few occasions did I stumble across a word that eluded either ...”