“... studies funded by governments and charities. The bias towards positive results has become self-perpetuating: when three-quarters or more of the papers published report positive findings, there is a strong incentive to avoid negative results, or to avoid writing them up.The worry is that scientific processes have been undermined by perverse incentives ...”

“... critics aided and abetted by the painter. But does all this matter much? He hangs well in his self-made private angst academy.Craxton wasn’t good at angst, or feuds. Baffled as well as hurt, he allowed himself to become obsessed. Natasha Spender recalled that the rupture and Freud’s attempt to ‘ruin his reputation … poisoned Johnny’s whole ...”

“... clear language allows us to laugh not only at the man’s predicament, but also at his self-importance. Poochigian translates the name Kinesias (‘Fucker’) as ‘Harden’, and has him bewail his frustration in suitably ridiculous terms:She has destroyed me! Killed me! Even worse:she got me all worked up and then just left.Oh, what I’m going ...”

“... it comes to crassness. She refers in passing to the film producer and director William Castle, a self-styled ‘master of gimmicks’ who specialised in cheerfully excessive horror movies, only to state in the next sentence that her book will concern itself with more ‘esoteric’ matters. During the 1950s, Hollywood sought to fend off the threat of ...”

“... the most ardent exponents of the devotio moderna – but privileged observers. Mary’s measured self-possession is astonishing. She raises her right hand, to silence the archangel (and us), and prepares to turn back to her book. There is nothing quite like it in Renaissance Italian art.Because of the gaps in the documentation, art historians have tended to ...”

“... of this, while if there are ultras who see any form of close engagement with literary texts as self-evidently a part of capitalism’s smokescreen, they aren’t likely to be persuaded otherwise by being made to read a few admiring paragraphs about the author of Practical Criticism. It is quite true that Richards’s ‘experiments in applied ...”

“... descriptions of the stable, fixed person appears to call into question the existence of a self, understood non-relationally.’ Family history, biology, social context – all these things, important in traditional approaches, dwindle almost to nothing in travel psychology. Desire remains the motivator, but ‘Where to?’ replaces the question of ...”

“... same cannot be said about the book accompanying the film, which is aggressively sumptuous and self-satisfied: large, beautiful and as inappropriate as a 5.4-pound souvenir added to an infantryman’s pack.)* We are in the sky, as the jungle is painted with napalm; in Washington DC, studying maps with optimistic generals; at home waiting, when American day ...”

“... and agency), but the tense sociology of difference: yeomen, gentlemen farmers, intellectuals and self-made businessmen vie to win the hand, or control the fate of Hardy’s female protagonists. These novels anxiously aspire to a world in which such difference might melt away, a place often glimpsed only beyond the limits of the plot. While the men are ...”

“... Démocratique (MoDem). Bayrou decided last month to jettison his candidature in an ‘act of self-denial’ to boost the chances of a centrist presidency: Macron’s. Bayrou is a stolid figure with a stolid following: in Houellebecq’s novel Soumission Bayrou is the perfect choice after the Islamist candidate wins the French presidency in 2022 and casts ...”

“... his own prize specimen. Mr Common Decency, it seemed, was capable of a level of performative self-neglect worthy of New York’s erstwhile Dada punk-queen, the Baroness Else von Freytag-Loringhoven. In the final pages of his book, Sutherland returns to ‘How the Poor Die’, and to the stink of ‘natural’ death. Is that what Orwell, in his last ...”

“... to a show of Agnes’s that uses her own blood as a medium. He’s alarmed by the undertone of self-harm, but wouldn’t an engineer father have a question about the how as well as the why? How, as a matter of technique, has Agnes fixed the blood in her indictment of the relentless petty cruelty of life so that it stays bright red on the walls? The ...”

“... That I’m blaspheming against a particular penis? I don’t think any mullah anywhere is going to self-identify to such an extent. And what you don’t know is that more than a few religious-minded scholars buy these paintings.’ When I asked if he’d ever had any formal training his explanation was not out of kilter with the rest of his life. ‘When I was ...”

“... left her well provided for. To be sure, Krupskaya tended to dislike important and, in particular, self-important men, putting Shaw in a distinguished company that included Stalin and Trotsky. But rudeness, or at any rate grumpiness, was her forte, and it stood her in good stead in her career as an Oppositionist after Lenin’s death. She mocked Trotsky (also ...”

“... it’s not easy to write well about rich Jews.)The first generation of Rothschild brothers were self-made men, admired for their financial brilliance and scorned for their lack of European culture. During the upheavals of the Napoleonic era, they settled in Frankfurt, London, Paris, Naples and Vienna. Salomon (1774-1855), founder of the Austrian branch, had ...”