He wrote of "iron self-discipline" as being a mark of a leader, but he was not an austere man.
Around the same time, the historian and native Mississippian David Herbert Donald wrote of the "self-contained world" in which the Mississippian lived: "When he traded, it was with other Mississippians.
They deprived him, he wrote, of his "English self" without helping him turn his "Arab skin" into anything more than an "affectation".
Francis Parkman, the great 19th-century historian, wrote of his youthful self, "His thoughts were always in the forest, whose features possessed his waking and sleeping dreams, filling him with vague cravings impossible to satisfy".
Her work darkened towards the end of her life: she wrote of deception and self-deception and of time's revenges, the twists and turns of an implacable fate that her worst charlatans could manipulate to their advantage.
He wrote of individuals as the "self-determinations" of the universal of self-awareness; and of absolute nothingness as a dialectical universal.
(Recalling a lesbian novel she disliked, Renault wrote of its "impermissible allowance of self-pity" and "earnest humourlessness").
My parents watch me from their perch outside Washington, D.C., and marvel at history's sense of irony: a son who ended up inventing himself in the country they left, who has written of the self-inventing swagger of a rising generation of Indians, in a country where "self" was once a vulgar word.
Analyzing Warhol, the art critic Donald Kuspit wrote of "the protean artist-self with no core" — a description that could also fit Mr. Bowie.
"I had no space or patience for my real self," Cohn wrote of his own pop-saturated adolescence in an introduction to "Awopbop".
Or, more fearfully, he wrote of his 12-year-old self: "I might easily have been…a little robber or a little vagabond".
