“... 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 ...”

“... army, obedient, punctual, untainted by education, free from seditious rage, long-suffering, self-sacrificing, grateful for the lowest wage. But a factory was not a regiment. Ruskin is quoted as saying it was ‘easy to imagine an enthusiastic affection among soldiers for the colonel, not so easy to imagine an enthusiastic affection for the proprietor of ...”

“... original purity to a society that thrives on a terribly debased version of it. The undertone of self-irony sometimes audible in his earlier work seems largely absent from this book. That is hardly surprising if one considers Bloom’s predecessors, the people who have sought to recover ancient religions that might either supplement or replace the ones we ...”

“... but had ended up as a humanist mirror-image of His omnipotence. There was something unpleasantly self-promoting about this generous-sounding humanism, which in its haste to praise human uniqueness ignored what we had in common with slugs. Historicism needed to be humbled by the biological and the geographical; we had to be recalled to our ...”

“... had been chased away by the coming of the railway, money and commerce had displaced barter and self-sufficiency, and the inhabitants of the village were no longer peasants but citizens. The place and period will be familiar to readers of George Sand, ‘La Bonne Dame du No-hant’, who lived only ten miles away, and created a timeless portrait of la France ...”

“... Artaud and Kafka. The exploration of the text’s non-referential dimensions, its rhetorical self-consumption, was at the heart of the theoretical revolution. But many of the theoretical reading strategies developed at that time depended on a heuristic separation between the author’s life and the author’s work. The author was considered ...”

“... was on the wane. Had he ever been truly valued ‘for himself’? But then, what was this self that he called his? And where did it belong, in Literature’s great call-up? Was he a left-over Pre-Raphaelite – a post Pre-Raphaelite? The grandson of Ford Madox Brown, he had spent his childhood trying to fathom the Rossettis. He was named after his ...”

“... was the author of the Waste-Books, an aphoristic, fragmentary and prodigiously sustained record of self-exploration. The role of all-purpose sage which Goethe filled for Erich Heller, as for so many prewar Central Europeans, was in Stern’s case reserved for Lichtenberg, to whose ‘doctrine of scattered occasions’ he devoted his longest monograph, and ...”

“... ease, to his own delight and the relief of others – there is probably something adolescent about self-torture. But in hindsight Davidson sees her own infrequent escapes to a more ordered world with suspicion and embarrassment. With her Rabari companions and her chauffeur, Koju, Davidson has been on a wearying journey to Ambadji, a place of pilgrimage on the ...”

“... and distanced them from the decadence of Versailles. Gradually, they became professionals, ‘a self-organising, self-disciplining, and self-promoting social body whose loyalty was to the state, rather than to the king’. At the technical core of de Gribeauval’s reforms were ...”

“... Dr Galen, a Hollywood plastic surgeon, is a conjuror for the stars in a Californian version of self-development – ‘A few millimetres shaved off her nose, a couple of ounces of silicone “here and there” became a passport to an entirely new world’; in ‘Rocketfire Red’, Jones skilfully evokes an anonymous waitress’s rough-edged Australian ...”

“... as a sign of inferior intelligence, and probably jealousy as well. He is likely to be short on self-doubt, perhaps even on self-knowledge, and he will tend to regard assistants, or even collaborators, as insignificant means to a necessary end. A good example of a lucky archaeologist was Sir Mortimer Wheeler. His talents ...”

“... the social obligations of the nobility; the compromises of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the fatal self-obsession of the Budapest Parliament, the in-fighting of the political parties, the need for peaceful intervention in the Balkans; the social politics of the hunt, the latest fashions in dress and in shooting, the Hungarian predilection for all things French ...”

“... where restoration of the balance of power was the best that could be hoped for. The principle of self-determination would now at last be realised across Europe. This was not to be an improvised affair. The British delegation’s composition and logistics had been calculated well in advance and to the finest detail by the Permanent Under-Secretary of the ...”

“... language, the insistence on something unrecognisable to set against the natural turpitude of the self. In his early years in England, Eliot liked to sign himself metoikos (‘resident alien’) in letters to journals, and was still calling himself a ‘spirit unappeased and peregrine’ by the time we get to ‘Little Gidding’, as if plain old ...”