“... ways of responding to this basic challenge. Behaviourists do what they can to render people’s self-understanding irrelevant: people are enlisted in studies ‘naively’ – that is, without being made aware of an experiment’s purpose – or take part in randomised control trials, in which they aren’t told whether or not they’ve been subject to an ...”

“... which had been founded in 1925. Not all of them saw themselves primarily as nationalist, or sought self-government for Wales, but, as King shows, they were densely interconnected.The new direction taken by Welsh campaigners was signalled in 1962 when Saunders Lewis, a founding member of Plaid Cymru, made a speech arguing that defending the Welsh language and ...”

“... Dickens as intimately as the man knew himself; better, perhaps, since Dickens was not great on self-knowledge. There are no lost keys, no closed doors. Ackroyd, for instance, can read the expression on the dead Dickens face on the narrow green sofa. The expression is childlike: ‘It was the look he recorded in William Dorrit’s face in death; it was the ...”

“... late instance of the Continental sage. What was his wisdom? He was interested in knowledge, self-knowledge above all. He believed that most pretenders to knowledge were ‘deluded’, and was convinced that literature must be unique in the knowledge it afforded, or else in giving a master-clue to the delusion of every sort of knowledge including its ...”

“... little stringent’, to the writer himself she returned an answer in which genuine humility and self-abasement can barely be distinguished from an edgy and corrosive irony:   In the evenings, I confess, I do think, but I never trouble any one else with my thoughts. I carefully avoid any appearance of pre-occupation and eccentricity, which might lead ...”

“... Andrew Motion’s book is intended to portray a family’s rich self-destructiveness. He begins with Larkin’s famous quatrain: Man hands on misery to man.   It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early as you can,   And don’t have any kids yourself. The Lamberts – painter George (1873-1930), composer-conductor Constant (1905-51), and manager of The Who, Kit (1935-81) – got out as early as they could, and of the two who had kids neither showed paternal enthusiasm or skill ...”

“... which he shares with the ideologues he is attacking seems to me to reflect a collective stupor of self-esteem so pervasive and naïve as to be likely to neutralise any intellectual defences against political brutalism. It would not surprise me if the institutionalisation of criticism as an autonomous and self-validating ...”

“... many times that it is hard to remember the first time as an isolated event’ – and many of her self-contained paragraphs note stratagems for order in the unstable behaviour of a group whose period of exile, as one of them sharply says, ‘is a waste of time’. Lisa St Aubin de Teran is a fine writer, and her subtle prose looks best when it ...”

“... at stake, British leaders and diplomats constantly insisted, was the right of the Falklanders to self-determination: if that right were to be prejudiced or removed, they said, it would cut across a basic provision of the Charter. All this was, of course, music to the ears of delegates representing small, vulnerable countries and, around the world, there are ...”

“... decision to retrain. People look to their jobs for so much that’s not written into any contract: self-respect, stability, social standing. Work is ‘a road’, as Richard Sennett once wrote, ‘to the unification of the self’. Except that it doesn’t usually end up like that, which is the reason the next page of the ...”

“... a lot of time distancing himself from contemporary poets and poetry, and particularly from their self-importance as bringers of news that was not news. He was interested in whether there was a good way of taking oneself seriously; and what, if anything, this had to do with the writing of poetry. The Lake Poets’ mistake, in Byron’s view, was to use nature ...”

“... collaborated on The Chairs Are Where the People Go, a book of ‘conversational philosophy’ (a self-help book for hipsters, really) that was made by Misha talking and Sheila typing, then shaping and assembling his thoughts into 72 mini-essays with titles like ‘Why a Computer Only Lasts Three Years’ and ‘Miscommunication Is Nice’. Heti ...”

“... of traditional Tudor styles with the more supple and elegant Mannerist line.His charismatic self-portrait – the only known likeness – was painted in France in 1577. He is around thirty years old, very handsome, with a plush embroidered cap tipped back raffishly to reveal his abundant curls. Goldring calls this image ‘an extraordinary act of ...”

“... of individuals forced by the scarcity of public services and the cost of private treatment into self-dentistry, sometimes aided by cheap off-the-shelf ‘kits’ for basic treatments up to and including replacing lost fillings. Armstrong first came across the phenomenon in Paisley, where one woman, concerned about being fined for a missed dentist’s ...”

“... of the militants but not of the constitutionalists, while Atkinson, mirroring the militants’ self-absorption, pretty much ignores the constitutionalists altogether. The movement deserves more hard-headed scrutiny: we should ask what it meant, for politics and for women themselves, for the claim to political equality to burst on the scene through the ...”