“... more like a starved poet than a revolutionist’. (Davitt in return called O’Donnell a ‘self-seeker and egotist’, ‘a most accomplished fraud, dishonest, treacherous, and aiming for office’.) These descriptions – and, perhaps, this invective – are not merely indicative of the prodigious detail of T.W. Moody’s new study: they supply much ...”

“... a second time and the Boat of Ra flew past as he came forth. The Two-Lands shivered beneath ... Self-aggrandisement was no sin in ancient Egypt. In fact, the more splendidly boastful one’s passage into the next world, the more secure one’s hold on the eternal goodies. Mailer’s main characters spend many a page locked into formal bouts of boasting ...”

“... Empire. But his eminence owed less to any outstanding military gifts than to the most shameless self-promotion. That unparalleled exhibitionist Sir Gerald Nabarro once said that without his moustache he might be mistaken for a nobody like Harold Wilson; behind his formidable moustache and haughty stare Kitchener was as scheming and ambitious a ...”

“... with a similar ‘teacher’, the sensei. Here, too, discipline is the key to harmony and self-fulfilment:    The sensei clapped his hands and it was time to begin ... Ito led the stretching and calisthenics, the others facing him in two lines. Ransom concentrated on duplicating his every move. With years of scrupulous imitation he might gain ...”

“... that could be deduced from a comprehensive biography like this one, or indeed from Waugh’s own self-projections, whether in his own life or in the heroes of his novels. Powell perceived, for instance, that Waugh was perfectly at home in his father’s house, that the pair were for the most part on affectionate terms and understood each other very ...”

“... contemporary style. It is wholly devoid even of latent vanity, for vanity goes with a process of self-creation, even if it is inadvertent; and though Heppenstall’s writing produces an unforgettable image of a way of life, it does not locate a personality in the midst of it. The effect is rather like that of a picture by Bonnard or Vuillard, which seems ...”

“... her father look at himself in a mirror. It never crossed his mind, she supposes, to keep a diary. Self-regard was no evident part of his nature. In a conductor that must be remarkable. Combining limitless executive power with the opportunity ritualistically to display it in public, the modern practice of conducting is wonderfully adapted to the expression of ...”

“... Beatrice records this renunciation of her own possible motherhood without a flicker of emotion or self-pity and goes on to urge that married women should also make the most of their intellectual faculties. ‘It pains me,’ she writes, ‘to see a fine intelligent girl, directly she marries, putting aside intellectual things as no longer pertinent to her ...”

“... the author’s books. If so, where to place Man’s Hope, Days of Wrath, and the post-Word War Two self-advertisements and hagiographies of General De Gaulle?’ For Lottman, the book is ‘a well-built narrative account of a revolutionary episode as it might have happened, with convincing personae who might reasonably have taken part in it’. Faint praise ...”

“... to fan mail (‘as many as two hundred letters a day’). The themes of these books – isolation, self-reliance, initiation – recur in his new memoir. So, too, do scenes of fantastic adventure and danger. The distinguishing feature of the new memoir – distinguishing it as a book for adults – is its depiction of sex, though this sex involves Paulsen’s ...”

“... a Social Science (1958), which stresses that Evans-Pritchard had given an account of a coherent, self-sustaining way of making sense of the world, one which ensured that belief in oracles would seem rational. These two interpretations imply two quite different answers to the question of whether understanding magic is compatible with believing in it. Thomas ...”

“... concepts and language shows that she’s aware of that. But her characters are living in a self-imposed anachronism. Their situations have been created by choice. Other options have been – and to an extent still are – open to them, but it takes them a long time to realise it. Kate Bain, of The Men and the Girls, gives up a difficult but ...”

“... there anything you would wish to do differently if you had your life over again?, with the rueful self-stricture, ‘Use fewer semi-colons’; and the narrator of Beckett’s Watt is wrung to a small sudden flat remonstrance: ‘How hideous is the semi-colon.’)The conventions of Elizabethan printing are here charted and illustrated: with a single lunula, to ...”

“... takes her revenge with a spirited patter song, indignantly denouncing the King as a ‘conceited, self-indulgent libertine’ and seizing the occasion to inform him in – absentia – of ‘certain goings on around this place/That I wish to tell you I do not admire.’ I do not like polygamy Or even moderate bigamy (I realise That in your eyes That clearly ...”

“... destructive, if not sadistic, acts. The younger girl, Mary Bell, was equally pretty but eerily self-controlled and thought to be the more intelligent and influential of the pair. Bell was found guilty on both counts of murder. She was described as ‘psychopathic’ and ‘very dangerous’. Referring to the second murder, she said in the open, adult ...”