“... You Also so powerful is that Steinberg doesn’t know what to make of himself: neither the younger self that he is trying to recollect nor the much older self who is struggling to write the book. He may not have liked Levi speaking for him and about him, but once he begins to reply, to answer back (and there is in almost ...”

“... these arguments and directs them at a generation he regards as either besotted with a belief in self-fashioning, a ‘dogmatic American voluntarism’ for which the world is ‘perpetually open’, or marked by a dialectically opposite sense of gloom and inertia deriving from a ‘culturalist or historicist hubris’ secure in the belief that nothing ...”

“... outward performance, not inward essence. No doubt Swift was drawn to La Rochefoucauld’s view of self-love as central to human nature, and when presenting one of his best-known poems as ‘occasioned’ by the Maxims, picked a passage so cynical that La Rochefoucauld had purged it from his definitive edition of 1678. The epigraph to ‘Verses on the Death of ...”

“... Baker cites in his exhaustive biography is Wheatley’s own memoirs, and Wheatley was a relentless self-aggrandiser; but it sounds about right. In the mid-1960s, three decades into his career, he had 55 books in print, which collectively accounted for one seventh of Hutchinson’s turnover; Arrow, Hutchinson’s paperback imprint, was selling 1,150,000 ...”

“... determination. He sits on the left of the screen, irresolutely regarding her but full of apparent self-confidence, facing her as she stands on the right, tentative yet absolutely decided. She persuades, she confesses, she shows her strength in her willingness to surrender, and all he can do is agree that he loves her and yet feebly evade her. Her fervour ...”

“... to the history of musical modernism. Prokofiev was intolerant, impetuous and obnoxiously self-centred, but he had an unmatched musical ear, an eye for detail and a keen wit. His lexicon of invective and arcane slang is not easy to translate into English, but Phillips succeeds magnificently. Put-downs range from ‘haemorrhoidal’ to ...”

“... as well – nurses, for example. There is a sense in which the Dubliners Bono and Bob Geldof are self-advertising versions of Irish missionaries. The English and Scottish Catholic churches have always relied heavily on Irish priests to minister to parishioners who were themselves perhaps only a generation or two away from the farm in Mayo or Meath. The ...”

“... a fine acting career, if migraines hadn’t stopped me’; this is characteristic of her resilient self-belief – or defensive bluster, depending which way you read it. ‘Aut inveniam viam, aut faciam,’ she wrote on the flyleaf of all her diaries: ‘I will either find out a way, or make one.’ For a ‘creative writer’, university would have been ...”

“... sacked him after only two months). Yet even in the face of impending ruin, Himmler’s self-belief remained strong. In the final phase of the war, he began planning for the peace ahead. In the spring of 1945, orders went out to the camps to end the shooting of Jewish inmates. Communicating through his former personal physician, Felix Kersten, now ...”

“... in Napoleon’s Garde Impériale, and Henri Savigny, a ship’s surgeon, published a passionately self-righteous account of the disaster. Naufrage de la frégate ‘La Méduse’ became an instant bestseller. It was a timely indictment of the Restoration government, which appeared to favour fossilised émigrés like Chaumareys simply because they had remained ...”

“... of the last half of this book, so that it is hard not to feel a little nostalgia for Clinton’s self-ascribed ‘glad-handing manner’ and his efforts to ‘bring people together’. This was a president who claims to have enjoyed the White House staff retreat, where everyone got to join in a bonding session by ‘telling something about ourselves the ...”

“... years was regarded by friend and enemy alike as just too damaged – charmless, pompous and self-obsessed – ever to play a useful role again. The same day – 15 September – had made Lyttelton a hero: fighting a few hundred yards away from Macmillan and Crookshank, he won the DSO, although the VC might have been appropriate. He fought on until April ...”

“... in Pride and Prejudice it is enough accurately to trace his unique combination of servility and self-importance. Caricature can be sharp perception of a true pattern of behaviour. In Pride and Prejudice, as Woloch notes, ‘Elizabeth can produce caricatures – it is one of the central qualities of her quickness.’ Yet Woloch shares enough of Eliot’s ...”

“... with an irrational persistence, generating cranky and parochial treatises on economics as well as self-serving defences of slavery. By the 1860s, Southerners had become so set in their backwardness that only a calamitous war could break the grip of the old ideas. Given such an unpromising landscape, who would want to read an intellectual history of the ...”

“... admirers subsequently liked to acknowledge. This reassessment has to take account of Joseph’s self-proclaimed conversion in 1974. The authors adduce sound reasons for doubting whether it could have been quite so sudden, quite so sweeping a revelation. Faced with the debacle that ended the Government in which he had served, perhaps this polite and ...”