“... of human shit. The book’s most extraordinary feature though is Carrington’s unsettling lack of self-pity. She describes how her parents sent her nanny to see her: ‘Tirelessly, Nanny repeated, “What have they done to you … what have they done to you,” and wept by my bed … I was exasperated by it, for I felt at that moment that my parents were ...”

“... the population are of only incidental concern to its leaders. This is a government which, in its self-imposed isolation, has effectively sanctioned itself. If the collapse of the North Korean economy after the Cold War and the Arduous March were not enough to prompt political change, or galvanise North Koreans to rise up, then no fudged punishment imposed ...”

“... enhancer of other sources of wellbeing, such as creative work or immersion in nature; or indeed as self-medication without professional involvement.Nobody at the MAPS conference wants to have this conversation. Insel advised that ‘psychedelics would probably need to be rebranded in the public mind and it would be essential to steer clear of anything that ...”

“... to locate’. Enter Laing and Clancy’s radical attempt to dismantle and heal his manic tormented self. (Clancy dubbed Laing ‘Willie Last’ in his satirical novel Zone of the Interior, published in 1976. Laing threatened libel action, so the novel was published here after Laing’s death.) At the time they met in his Wimpole Street office, Laing was in his ...”

“... was dead. It was Waugh’s only attempt to take up a public cause, ‘with all the pomposity and self-importance’ required, and it convinced him of ‘the fatuity of politics’ and the ‘wickedness of politicians’, who were prepared to commit any atrocity in the pursuit of power ‘if they think they can get away with it’. With the Thorpe campaign he ...”

“... an external reality. To take one pressing example, Cantwell Smith argues that safely controlling a self-driving car in an urban environment will require the kind of judgment that makes such awareness necessary. Perhaps, but it seems at least possible that careful engineering could make a car that would be safe enough, even if it doesn’t really know what it ...”

“... to the more desirous and devouring end of the love-song spectrum – there would be no pleading or self-abasement, and if you didn’t answer the bloody phone she would just ring it off the wall. Harry’s voice was not big, not powerful, but she taught herself to use it with tremendous precision: Chapman hadn’t realised, he said, that she’d planned to do ...”

“... from the bedroom window. Brushing my teeth this morning, I catch a glimpse of my New Year self and am depressed to see how depleted I’m looking, though not quite as much as Raymond Briggs, who’s pretty much my age, and a good documentary on whom we watched earlier yesterday evening. He’s almost two-dimensional, thinned to a knife ...”

“... palace. All those are helpful. But they come second to two basic forms of knowledge. The first is self-knowledge: what the hell do you think you are doing? Are you clear about your aim, are you just getting rid of the current rulers, or installing a regime you have designed to be your obedient servant for years to come (in which case invasion might be simpler ...”

“... Drake, an actress and writer so interested in psychology that she helped Grant towards levels of self-examination that included LSD therapy. Then he betrayed her, terribly, with Sophia Loren, whom he thought he wanted to marry. Dyan Cannon was marriage number four, and Barbara Harris, a hotel publicist in London, was the fifth. But we are left in no doubt ...”

“... wage’ met the needs of women and children, how deeply it undermined women’s independence and self-respect, how it compromised women’s capacity to earn, and how it was far from ‘natural’ but rather a human institution of relatively recent vintage. So I can’t help but feel indignant on Rathbone’s behalf when reading a work that painstakingly ...”

“... carts or ‘my body’s co-ordinates in time and space’. It is ‘determined to march through my self’. It is ‘imposing a totalising collectivist vision of life in the hive, with surveillance capitalists and their data priesthood in charge of oversight and control’. She doesn’t agree with the familiar remark that if a digital service is ...”

“... home in this anti-apartheid warren and his word ‘ingenuity’ seems to honour the busy African self-reinvention he could still see in the workshops: ingenuity was about making good from making do, trying to keep the show on the road. In one image a young boy in short trousers, short sleeves and tie is poised on tiptoe tuning an antique three-string double ...”

“... deals or infrastructure contracts.Kuper thinks Labour’s success at fund-raising reflects ‘a self-reinforcing symbiosis between the political positions that the donors want, what Starmer instinctively wants, and what seems to make electoral sense’. The party’s record haul of donations doesn’t include the millions that have flowed into Labour ...”

“... eyes, Laura was ‘the real beauty’ of the three Marx sisters. She was also strong-willed, self-confident and a staunch atheist. Arriving at a Hastings boarding house for a holiday with her little sister in the year she met Lafargue, Laura immediately told the landlady that the two girls had no intention of attending church on Sunday and could not ...”