“... 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 ...”

“... Under My Skin (1994) and Walking in the Shade (1997), she did so, as she explained, partly in ‘self-defence’, aware that at least ‘five American biographers’ were then writing their versions of her life. Some had been in touch and had been given short shrift; others she had never met. ‘Yet another can only be concocting a book out of supposedly ...”

“... orderly, tradition-bound past in the face of that squalid cult of anarchic subjectivism, self-expressive personality, economic laissez-faire, Protestant ‘inner light’ and Bolshevik subversion which Eliot lumped together with cavalier indiscriminateness under the name of ‘Whiggery’. This Janus-faced temporality, in which one turns to the ...”

“... would be deliberately to kill Rosie. Lord Justice Ward argued that this act was one of ‘quasi self-defence’ (with the doctors acting on Gracie’s behalf). Rosie, he wrote, ‘may have a right to life, but she has little right to be alive. She is alive because and only because, to put it bluntly, but nonetheless accurately, she sucks the lifeblood of ...”

“... Xtopher,’ Stephen Spender wrote in April 1931, ‘is a cactus.’ Prickly, solitary, self-sufficient, hard to handle and difficult to love. How to get to grips with ‘Isherwood’ (as he has chosen to address him) was a problem for Peter Parker: something that perhaps explains the 12 years this usually brisk biographer has spent on his task ...”

“... and bewildered viewpoint). Patrick can get no comfort, either, from his mother, Eleanor, a cold, self-conscious, self-absorbed heiress. By the time we join Patrick in the second novel, Bad News, he is in his mid-twenties, is in New York to collect his father’s ashes, and has become a fizzing pill of rage and grief and ...”

“... hesitate to list them, and sometimes summarise them, for pages on end. Nowhere is 4321 more self-congratulatory than on the subject of race. The white protagonists of this book are morally unimpeachable; Amy, in one timeline, becomes a civil rights activist who dates a black man, and Ferguson is routinely presented with opportunities to demonstrate that ...”

“... the continent during the 1960s: Havana’s revolutionary fervour was tempered by its instinct for self-preservation and Castro didn’t want to give the US a pretext to invade; he understood that sending Cubans off to fight in Latin America would be far more provocative than bringing in hundreds of Latin Americans to the island for training. Between 1961 and ...”