“... things, but contain them.’ And indeed, like her chosen idol, Cather made a fetish out of proud self-concealment. She never married, and despite the tremendous popular success of her work – she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours and had her picture on the cover of Time magazine in 1931 – she became reclusive and incommunicative in later years. She ...”

“... illusions under which the rest of mankind had blindly laboured for millennia. His unjustifiable self-assurance remains noteworthy because it proved so eminently transmissible, helping his philosophy attract ardent devotion, after 1890 or so, often from those who (in Adorno’s diagnosis) suffered from acute insecurity in decision-making and therefore ...”

“... a graceas final as that fault line in the mindwhere wildernesscomes slanting through the glintof self-deceit and guile to claim its ...”

“... in Staying Alive – well, most of them – don’t need any assistance. If you ignore the huggy, self-help element, it’s a very good anthology indeed. Poets, happily, are less likely than editors or publicists to make claims about the power of poetry to do good. Auden and Marianne Moore (whose poem ‘Poetry’ begins: ‘I, too, dislike it’) both ...”

“... no law saying that anyone has to read these books, and the pain suffered by doing so is entirely self-inflicted. Still, it seems a pity that so few cricketers try to write their own books. Cricket is the most introspective team sport, for reasons which mainly boil down to the amount of time the game takes. That must be one of the reasons why cricketers are ...”

“... bystanders who had been stressed beyond endurance by events and become ‘pusillanimous and often self-tormenting’, lapsing into ‘a dark despondency of the soul alternating with terror or rage’. Pinel, the first in the emerging profession of psychiatry to speculate on the effect of revolution on a nation’s mental health, was confronted with a paradox ...”

“... each other’s souls,’ Lord Charles Beresford said. Their children, buoyant on champagne and self-belief, were the first to turn against them. ‘Their minds are almshouses [for] outworn notions and wrinkled phrases,’ Raymond Asquith, Margot’s stepson, sneered. ‘We do not hunt the carted hares of thirty years ago. We do not ask ourselves and one ...”

“... with anxiety. They are concerned when machines do what we want to do; and they have species-self-doubt when machines do things that once defined what it was to be uniquely human. The worst worry is that the machines will refuse our orders, that they may acquire a will of their own, and want free agency. You start out with some matter-of-fact ...”

“... didn’t feel up to working, and at times could be charming, funny, informal. She admits a rather self-congratulatory fondness for him as he struggles against artistic extinction, while reporting back to us on his need to pee half a dozen times a night: he often had a urinary infection for which he drank an infusion of cherry-tree bark. It’s also worth ...”

“... had a peculiar accent: ‘Perhaps Polish Jew?’ Deborah Baker suggests that it may have been her self-consciousness about her accent that caused Riding, many years later, to talk about poetry as a place ‘where the fear of speaking in strange ways could be left behind’ and ‘as a way of speaking differently from the untidy speaking ways of ordinary ...”

“... of an unreliable witness whose claims are to be duly cross-questioned and judged by some higher, self-validating discourse of truth. But reflection on the status of the courtroom officials suggests that this authority of law (or reason) may be exposed to further complications. To inquire where the ultimate verdict derives from – the quaestio quid juris of ...”

“... buried in this catalogue.’ Gates has helped black studies to progress from what he calls a ‘self-esteem machine’ to a serious and valued discipline and his latest achievement is to put the obscure manuscript he bought at auction into the US bestseller lists. What Gates discovered in the Swann Galleries’ list was almost certainly the first novel ...”

“... but surpass it when the war was over, going on to gain world fashion dominance with its noble, self-respecting styles. Never a word appeared about what the clothes should look like; no analysis was made of which shapes, colours and textures or ways of composing and wearing them might make German frocks eclipse Paris frocks in the postwar world. Guenther ...”

“... Pico was a scholastic, and he defended medieval university philosophy against the eloquent, self-consciously innovating humanists who were his friends and lovers.Pico never delivered his Oration. And it turns out that this most famous speech of the Renaissance isn’t really about the dignity of man at all. It’s about destroying personhood in pursuit ...”

“... merely the establishment of areas of life which governments and laws must not enter, but political self-government or (what Skinner apparently takes to be the same thing) political equality. Berlin, suggests Skinner, was mistaken in taking himself to be carrying out a ‘purely neutral task’ of ‘philosophical analysis’. Rather, he was endorsing a view ...”