“... arms – the Andrew Doria received an official salute. By recognising American independence, a self-serving Dutch colonial governor triggered a major confrontation between Britain and the Netherlands. The British authorities badgered the Dutch, but since the Dutch had allowed their once-formidable Navy to decay, they were in no position to defend national ...”

“... more leisurely, less aggressive colloquialism. Enright’s refusal to acknowledge art as a self-justifying absolute – as Larkin did, whatever his protestations to the contrary – is crucial to what might be called the social dimension of Enright’s poetry: its genial, raconteurish tone, its willingness to negotiate with foreign countries and ...”

“... Labour Party – as it was intended to. It was also a public admission that the Party had lost the self-confidence – the belief that, whatever the electorate thought, the future was on its side – which had sustained it from 1918 until the early Eighties. Mr Blair has done what Hugh Gaitskell failed to do and what no other Labour leader has even ...”

“... of financial and commercial control. It mattered because of the felt need to assert identity, self-worth and independence. It was not surprising that professionalism rapidly took hold, and that in 1895 a large body of Northern clubs seceded from the Rugby Football Union to establish what became the separate code of rugby league. The Southern clubs could ...”

“... of good will’; ‘a little unpopular with the other boys, who regard him as rather boastful and self-important’; ‘I much admired his fighting spirit in the boxing’ (here too, perhaps, the dandy’s liking for a dressing-gown); ‘splendid work’ with the Combined Cadet Force. Chatwin may have been a butterfly but he was also something of a ...”

“... gliding between his exotic physiognomy and his deeply conservative and anti-physical inner self, gives romanticism a strange name: Young England. Byron, embracing the hilarity and misjudgments of the erotic life, leaves England behind. Disraeli is no less interesting than Byron, but something of the emptiness of his sexual pose is illustrated in the ...”

“... it was ‘somewhat too composed ... for me to accept it as a direct cry from the heart’. This self-legitimising complaint sits rather oddly in Hamilton’s mouth, since he admits that his own letter to Salinger had been ‘completely disingenuous’, and that he’d deliberately phrased it in a way which he imagined his subject would ‘heartily ...”

“... work of the highest originality. It is typical of Wright’s need to present himself as uniquely self-made that he was cagey about admitting influences – Sullivan apart. Gill’s book is particularly revealing about Wright’s knowledge of the work of his European contemporaries. Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock’s catalogue of the 1932 ...”

“... he discerned in his wife’s personality and the texture of their marriage. In equal parts self-deprecating and self-assured, emotional but not sentimental, intimate but not indiscreet, his voice is so trustworthy that it is impossible not to believe him. That’s why the few moments when he admits that the fog might ...”

“... in’. As in the film, the scene expresses a refusal to be ground down, but in a grittier, less self-glorifying way. Getting your teeth knocked out (something Anderson plays up) can be glamorous: wearing dentures for the next forty years less so. The changing-room, with its naked truths about manliness, would feature prominently in Storey’s writing over ...”

“... over and done with, as Francis Fukuyama has no doubt been discovering from his post-bag. They are self-disconfirming prophecies, Cretan Liar paradoxes which, like all appeals to make it new, add one more item to that venerable lineage known as the avant-garde. Besides, you can only break with history if you are already standing somewhere inside it, and the ...”

“... disastrous marriage, while Carr traces the couple’s unhappy history in excruciating detail. The self-portrait of illumination is fuzzy and vague as if a light were being turned not on the subject’s face, but into the viewer’s eyes; Carr’s portrait is both appealing and unflattering. This is Frankie Addams as a psychic vampire, a perennial waif who ...”

“... Emperor Qianlong, was considerably less overwhelmed. How equivocal our ‘sightings’ have been: self-deceiving, self-seeking, self-consoling or self-indulging. And yet there has been some truth there at times. The trouble with stereotypes is not that ...”

“... to reinvest their disparate memories in the newly re-established city. But by the 18th century the self-run city-state’s sovereign authority had passed to an absentee suzerain, Sultan Barqash of Zanzibar. In 1899 he leased Mogadishu to the Italians, who used it as a primary frontier settlement for several years, and later consolidated their colonial ...”

“... soul, a technique for achieving spiritual constancy and calm. Diogenes found few traces of saintly self-control in the lives of his philosophers, however, and the cumulative effect of his tales is comical rather than edifying. Take Chrysippus, who died of a fit of laughter brought on by one of his own feeble jokes; or Epimenides, who went out one day to look ...”