Being able to defend myself effectively helps me to feel safe, dignified and self-worthy; being a civilised, disarmed Englishman, at the mercy of anyone with more muscle and less morality, would feel ghastly by comparison.MATTHEW MOOREBellevue, WashingtonLeading the chargeSIR Bagehot (April 24th) says that Lady Thatcher persuaded George Bush to go to war to rescue Kuwait from Saddam Hussein.
Nearly as legendary is his ego, a self-confidence worthy of an impresario whose success has long emboldened him to think on grand scales.
At the level of content, he gave us the worst of himself: he laid out, with an intensity of self-scrutiny worthy of comparison to Kafka and Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, the extremes of his own narcissism, misogyny, compulsiveness, self-deception, dehumanizing moralism and theologizing, doubt in the possibility of love, and entrapment in footnotes-within-footnotes self-consciousness.
It's a feat of self-immolation worthy of Larry David.
Miraculously, Bitter Chocolate by Sally Grindley (Bloomsbury £5.99) manages to avoid such smugness despite its self-evidently worthy credentials.
JON CARAMANICA Crystal Bowersox "All That for This" (Shanachie) Crystal Bowersox's first album after the circus glare of "American Idol," in 2010, was titled "Farmer's Daughter" — a wry bit of self-definition worthy of a political memoir.
If you're anything like me, news of Vine's demise led to you scrolling through your account and marvelling at the distinctly average videos your past selves deemed worthy of sharing with the world.
"Jennifer's Body has more to say about the dynamics of teenaged female friendship, sexual power games and the trials of adolescence than many a more self-consciously worthy film, but even without this uplifting backbone it would still be an above averagely entertaining night at the cinema," she writes.
"I just hope people can get through it without becoming bored, angry or violent," he says with self-deprecation worthy of a scene from The I.T. Crowd.
They usually centre around the overblown reaction the story will supposedly have on you – all 'restore your faith in humanity' and 'stay with you every minute of the day' – or else harness the curiosity gap, providing next to no information in the headline so you have to click through to find the unbelievable, mind-altering, self-defenestration-worthy story.
In contrast, when a child experiences rejection and the needs for comfort and exploration are ignored or are inconsistently met, the infant is likely to develop internal working models of the self as less worthy, less lovable, and less self-reliant, prompting feelings of rejection, hostility, anxiety, and ambivalence (Bowlby 1988).
