“... This is the story of a goatherd who progressed through destitution and self-education to become the printer of the first edition of Calvin’s greatest work and one of the most respected teachers in Reformation Switzerland. It is also the story of his son, who trained as a doctor, fostered a household of four children, and died leaving 42 musical instruments, a set of skeletons and other bones of creatures from mouse to mammoth (he believed the latter to have belonged to a huge man), a tulip garden, artefacts from across the whole of the newly-discovered globe, stuffed crocodiles and a live elk that doubled as a lawnmower ...”

“... watchmaker, musician, international go-between, entrepreneur, secret agent, pamphleteer, self-appointed diplomat, publisher and gunrunner – with brash, self-serving zeal. Even his literary reputation seems rather shopsoiled. His fame rests on Le Barbier de Séville (1775) and Le Mariage de Figaro (1784), the only ...”

“... on a lead tablet in order to strike a group of doctors with unemployment is a more embarrassing (self-) image. The erotic spells can be vivid: I bind you, Theodotis daughter of Eus, by the tail of the snake and by the mouth of the crocodile and by the horns of the ram, and by the venom of the asp and by the whiskers of the cat and by the penis of the ...”

“... of the Irish Home Rule Bill in 1893. The leading City institutions were singularly lacking in self-consciousness, and, then as now, far too busy doing business and earning commissions to worry much about public relations – and no honeypot the size of the Late Victorian City was ever without its flies. There was Barney Barnato, ...”

“... own ministers’ sponge-like attitudes to business interests. The official accommodation of these self-interested private lobbies in a representative democracy contains serious implications which – because of unequal resources – go behind and beyond the proper access of citizens to government. Parliament is filled with paid mouthpieces for private ...”

“... More recently, the BBC precipitately withdrew a programme on Peter Wright’s book Spycatcher. Self-censorship has replaced censorship from outside – where the issues at least tend to become known. Self-censorship operates in the dark. Self-censorship also signals a loss of political ...”

“... to the violations committed by children on children, quietly talking alone.’ He is not one for self-analysis, but he says: ‘I was full of self-confidence when I first went to Eton ... Public school and three long years of remorseless nastiness squeezed every last trace of confidence from me. It would take a long time ...”

“... with an apology for the partiality of one’s own perspective. This preliminary admission of self-limitation seems, actually, almost the only cohering aspect of American poetry criticism. Why do English and American poetry at the moment seem so far apart? It was not so long ago that figures like Lowell and Berryman and Plath were integral to the English ...”

“... norm. This new prosperity has affected Italian civic behaviour. The stereotype of the anarchic, self-interested Italian, the ‘rampant egoist, devoid of any sense of society’ has given way to what LaPalombara calls the ‘New Pluralism’ – a new emphasis on voluntarism and an explosion in the number of interest groups and ...”

“... assuming other people’s voices it makes a set of rather dubious presumptions. The children’s self-naming, for example, is used to indicate not just their ethnic origin but also their social class and their intelligence. Thus, inevitably, the stupid young white English male who talks a kind of Estuary slob-speak gets called Wayne (‘all children called ...”

“... half a million refugees. Yet the recent success of the economic agreements between Knin (the self-proclaimed capital of the Krajina Serbs) and Zagreb disproves the claim that Croatia is analogous to Cyprus. After a relatively short interval, the Serbs of Knin were talking to Zagreb and a degree of trust was established. However frustrating the UN’s ...”

“... dries you up, or it makes you think you are infallible, or your writing becomes puffed out with self-esteem. (Victor Hugo thought himself superior to both Jesus and Shakespeare.) It is a complication that the imagination can well do without.’ It is the spring of 1993. Gunn is on the list of those who will read at a literary festival in a huge old market ...”

“... thought that white children also should know about heroic African-Americans, it ends up with the self-fulfilling prediction that they will remain separated from their black contemporaries not just by money and life-chances but by a ‘difference of culture’. As Alan Ryan has pointed out, the people who wave the banners of multiculturalism typically pride ...”

“... and more a question of masquerade, what the authors call ‘female female impersonation’, a self-conscious performance of gender via costume (Millay’s girlish frocks, Moore’s cape and tricorn hat) and metaphor. They see this phenomenon more clearly in poetry than fiction: ‘since fiction by definition entails figuring, while poets have often tended ...”

“... and after this well-known, much publicised and highly controversial royal liaison, she was a self-made career woman and a self-supporting working mother. For Mrs Jordan was the greatest comic actress of her day – adored by theatre-goers in London and the provinces; acclaimed by Hazlitt, Byron and Coleridge; cartooned ...”