“... personality evolved towards late-flowering celebrity. In one of Lees-Milne’s regular pessimistic self-assessments, amid laments about his loss of hair and declining libido at 40, he noted that despite it all his mental faculties, ‘never first-rate, are better than they have ever been’. ‘All my life,’ he adds, ‘I have been a slow developer.’ It is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Ellender sees this baby list as an outpouring of hope on the page, or a ‘letter to a future self. We have to visualise a self that is well, happy, functioning, a self free from shame, a self performing its tasks efficiently and happily.’ The ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as the Encyclopaedia Britannica put it in 1787. It was as protomodernists, ideal familiars of the self-conscious urban individual, that cats came into their own. To the avant-garde their aloofness seemed introspective; their sphinx-like calm and hieratic inscrutability (that capacity to shutter their vision which had struck others as sinister) was at one with ...”

“... and then half pay for a further 26 weeks. For the first seven days of my illness I can ‘self-certify’; after that I have to go to my GP and get what are, ironically, called ‘fit notes’ at regular intervals. If an employer doesn’t have an occupational sick pay scheme, they only have to pay workers Statutory Sick Pay – £99.35 a week for up ...”

“... time. Mourning the ‘death of Adam’, European intellectuals embraced a ‘less narcissistic’ self-image. Man no longer descended from the gods but instead emerged from beasts. In The Invention of Prehistory, Stefanos Geroulanos makes the opposite argument. Recognition of a past without people yielded a centuries-long ‘obsession’ with trying to find ...”

“... aesthetic and ethical disposition; violence, and in particular male violence against women; self-harm, especially but not exclusively women’s; and what she pointedly does not call masochism. ‘The mode of violence that gets beneath my skin and really haunts me is not those destructive acts perpetrated by one upon another, for reasons good, bad or ...”

“... out. God the reader, if you like, was taken as read. Borgesian highlightings put such issues on a self-conscious plane of fragmented intellection, and are the imaginative manifestation of a fall from grace, as the critical routines of modern ‘rhetorics of reading’ are its academic counterpart or epiphenomenon. Professor Nuttall is a richly humane reader ...”

“... and psycho-analytic thinkers such as Barthes, Kristeva and Lacan, his was a name of which no self-respecting British intellectual could afford to remain entirely ignorant – though his novels, so far as I can discover, were neither translated nor read. But as Sollers grew older he abandoned his youthful Maoism to become a worshipper of American ...”

“... standard is nothing less than perfection. In my experience, no species of performing artist is as self-critical as a dancer. I have gone backstage many times to congratulate a friend or acquaintance who is an actor or a pianist or a singer on his or her superlative performance; invariably my praise is received without much demurral, with evident pleasure (my ...”

“... on, respectively, a word processor and a tape recorder needn’t be put down to Post-Modern self-consciousness. Novels naturally like to keep up with the technology on which they rely, but an appeal – however disingenuous – to external machinery and allegedly objective documentation is thoroughly classical. In skilled hands, such honesty about the ...”

“... good man. By ‘good’, Canetti makes it clear, he means untainted by any trace of levity, self-interest or obeisance to fashion. Broch finally remembers Dr Sonne and suggests how the other can meet him. Canetti does so and is captivated. Henceforth he meets this hero of heroes for two hours every day in the Café Museum. They talk and talk – or ...”

“... Do we have ‘friends’, or do we just know various people? There is something a bit sticky and self-conscious about the idea of friendship. Anyone can be in love and proud of it, but to have a ‘friend’ – no, it really won’t do. ‘I’m your friend,’ said Myfanwy to John as they crouched in the ‘dark and furry cupboard while the rest played hide-and-seek ...”