“... 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 ...”

“... the procedures of post-structuralism and deconstruction. They can talk about decentred texts and self-reflexive narration; they acknowledge that a text has an unconscious, and that it can be read against the grain of its author’s apparent intentions. They see that Eminem’s lyrics might be a ‘text’ in the way that Middlemarch is a text. They are often ...”

“... devastating effects for Polish nationhood. After the defeat of 1863, Poles were denied any form of self-rule, and the tsarist state attempted to make them into Russians, suppressing their religion, denying them higher education in their own language, rewarding assimilation. The trauma produced a counter-tendency to romanticism: positivism. Positivists judged ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... would take the frequent changes of course as vacillations, Dreyfus and Rabinow see Foucault’s self-corrections as a healthy sign of learning from temporary mistakes without deviating from a central direction. Foucault himself says here that the theme of his research was always the subject (and, surprisingly, not power): that is, how human beings ...”

“... of the great specialists like Rafael Santos Torroella or Dawn Ades, let alone to the artist’s self-assessment as an impotent, infantile perverse polymorph and a bit of a monster. Take the 1942 autobiography, The Secret Lift of Salvador Dalí, written to seal his rebirth into the post-Republican family of power. It was ...”