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“... their eyes with belladonna and, finally, inducing unconsciousness with sleeping powders’. Other self-mutilators have been known to scald their bodies with hot towels then rasp bricks across the sensitised skin; lacerate their gums so that they can spit blood; inject mineral oil into a joint to give the appearance of a badly swollen sprain; eat soap to ...”

“... bond in which the person is heavily – if not wholly – invested, and whose loss unseats that self that is Me. Fears about genetic engineering and cloning focus on the physical transmission of character traits along with body parts. If I’m a dead-ringer for someone else, where have I gone? Where is the self? How can I ...”

“... and as the great names of the Société Géologique de France were called on to adjudicate, so the self-made man Deprat lost, one by one, the friends he had made on his way from obscurity to fame. It was a protracted business. Deprat had to go back to the field under the eye of Lantenois in an attempt to replicate his discoveries; he failed. The contentious ...”

“... According to the catalogue for the National Gallery exhibition of Rembrandt self-portraits, the artist’s portrayal of himself is ‘unique in art history, not only in its scale and the length of time it spans, but also in its regularity’. But Rembrandt’s production of self-portraits – at least forty paintings, 31 etchings and a few drawings – is unique only if we ignore the last fifty years ...”

“... as the Victorians he writes about, to show how science and literature shared an ethos of self-annihilation as the price of knowledge – knowledge about nature, society and identity. Charles Darwin and George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda in the novel of that title, the aesthete Walter Pater and the statistician Karl Pearson, the political economist ...”

“... Dollar bills, pound notes, they’re suicide notes. Money is a suicide note.’ So says John Self, the hero of Money: A Suicide Note, and what he means is that money is destroying him. Self-destruction (along with several of its hyphenated pals: indulgence, interest, loathing) has become Self’s hobby, what he does in his spare time, and what he spends his money on ...”

“... the mental subject of your experiences, thoughts, feelings, memories and emotions. This inner self is only indirectly observable by others, though they ordinarily have no doubt about its existence, as you have no doubt about their inner lives. One of the enduring questions of philosophy is whether there really is such a thing as the ...”

“... The problem the 20th century had with Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help was that the conjunction of ‘self’ and ‘help’ sounded too much like the opposite of the welfare state. Smiles’s creed, it was assumed, was Thatcherism of the crudest ‘on yer bike’ sort, all the more regrettable for being so far avant la lettre ...”

“... he treats this drama of the opportune and the principled, of the amused and the committed, very self-consciously – as a question of form. So autobiography is a problem in his novels, akin to a conscience. It tempers self-invention with other considerations; and the temptations in story-telling – what he called ‘the ...”

“... to this vision of an egalitarian community governed by the principle of freely-given service, and Self-Ownership, Freedom and Equality can be seen as an indirect attempt to reaffirm its relevance. On the surface its concerns may seem to be different: to establish which parts of Marxism are still defensible and which are not, and to scrutinise the idea of ...”

“... the gauleiter, the commissar. Perhaps I should be grateful.’ 3. ‘We all know that it is self-centred and dangerous to concentrate too much on becoming prime minister or on making a fortune, but are there no analogous dangers in concentrating on one’s own spiritual progress? Is not a life spent in fighting ...”

“... There are really only two things people want to keep from public scrutiny: their real, private self; or the fact that they have no private self of any particular interest. Now, my instinctive guess is that everyone is nursing the fear that the real them doesn’t amount to very much worth knowing ...”

“... of human nature to which other disciplines are blind. Robert Trivers’s new book, Deceit and Self-Deception, is an exercise in applying this evolutionary heuristic. Why do we mislead ourselves? The conventional understanding is that self-deception is a type of defence mechanism: deep down we know the world to be a ...”

“... In parts of our literary culture the idea of the self is derided as a bourgeois fabrication, ripe for deconstruction. But most readers remain very attached to selves, their own and other people’s, and like reading about them in biographies and autobiographies. Such books are evidently popular with publishers, and accounts of them regularly fill the review columns of the Sunday papers ...”

“... or psychotic. In psalm after psalm, translation after translation, fantasies of punishment and self-punishment segue into expressions of great joy, deep despair and exaggerated, frabjous praise. Indeed, of all the books in the Bible there is perhaps none more sick and giddy, none more clearly and floridly mad, none more ...”