“... sense of something that Cicero in De Divinatione considered the big issue: god/s. An author as self-conscious as Wood is, of course, by no means innocent of the possibility of his own oracularity qua author, which serves nicely to ironise the quantity of erudite, esoteric allusion, alternately formal and familiar, which will for many readers be the most ...”

“... that The Man Who Was Thursday, published only six months before Orthodoxy, is an intimately ‘self-revealing’ book, and by his careful reading of that text. I found his comments on Orthodoxy very helpful too, since he makes it clear that Chesterton, in what he himself calls ‘a sort of slovenly autobiography’, is playing an interesting double ...”

“... any real happiness. There is some routine piety in this letter, as well as considerable effort at self-discipline. Kemble is assuring herself, as much as her correspondent, that she does not unduly depend on the applause of the crowd. But the evidence suggests that the anti-theatricality of this celebrated actress was not merely a pose, and that even when she ...”

“... looking for here was not the ridiculous but the criminal’. And finally, to return to the sunny, self-rescuing Camus, our murderer resents ‘the insolent certainty’ of the process that will lead to his death, the absence of pardon or appeal or escape, ‘the ridiculous disproportion between the judgment at the basis of it and its imperturbable unfolding ...”

“... third novel, his fourth book when you include the Tintin one, and part of an ambitious self-managed campaign that also includes propaganda, film (he wrote the story, adapted from Borges, told in Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take), and conceptual artworks, the latter largely from his position as general secretary of the International Necronautical ...”

“... sake of freedom. Again, the distribution of income and wealth that the market produced was neither self-evidently fair nor always socially beneficial. If the distribution became too unequal, or damaged society in other ways, government had to intervene. There was nothing intrinsically valuable in the market itself. In an agenda-setting speech, delivered at the ...”

“... story ‘Flight’); he was supposed to be the one who got to go everywhere. In his 1988 memoir Self-Consciousness (a sort of pre-emptive strike against biographers that Begley both exploits and shows to be evasive), he calls Nancy Nora: It was courtesy of Nora that I discovered breasts are not glazed bouffant orbs pushing up out of a prom dress but soft ...”

“... and formal procedures, reading resolutions and exegeses that explained, in the characteristic self-satisfied tone of Soviet bureaucratic documentation, that the wise decisions of the Party’s Central Committee and Council of Ministers had been duly disseminated, hailed by the public, and implemented. At the same time, he was making friends in ...”

“... the life of the prophet – violent, intolerant, misogynistic – that Muslims were incapable of self-rule. ‘These days, I am a little disturbed,’ the Mughal aristocrat Sir Syed Ahmad Khan wrote in his diary in the summer of 1869. ‘I am reading Muir sahib’s book … It has burned my heart.’ A founding father of Islamic modernism, which attempted to ...”

“... in. People come along as a first step in the effort to start uncovering and developing their own self-relations and their relations to the world. ‘Very often a desire to write is a desire to live more honestly through language … The notion of “finding your voice”, simplistic as it may sound, is … a social goal.’ Thus, presumably, the genesis of ...”

“... own trash, was overrun with rich tech people who defied the festival’s precious tenet of radical self-reliance with their over-reliance on paid staff. Burning Man, which started in 1986 when twenty people burned an effigy on a beach, was turning into a dusty version of Davos. Old-timers lamented the rise of ‘plug and play’ culture. There were too many ...”

“... Hergé, and in his occasional essays, his posture comes across as a faintly parodic version of a self-assured young lecturer’s. The audience is projected as being essentially onside – agreeing it’s ‘a little disappointing’ that J.G. Ballard wasn’t fully down with the programme, or ‘snickering’ along with the speaker at ‘the words ...”

“... If you were​ throwing a pity party among American playwrights, the antisocial, alcoholic, self-dramatising misery named Eugene Gladstone O’Neill would win the door prize. At the age of 21, already making a myth of his sense of doom, O’Neill was calling himself ‘the Irish luck kid’. By then, he’d been thrown out of Princeton (‘Ego’ was his nickname), fathered a son with his divorced first wife, caught syphilis in his wanderlust around South America as a merchant seaman, and attempted suicide in a Greenwich Village fleabag called ‘the Hell Hole’ by its permanently pie-eyed denizens ...”

“... Göring and captivated Shaw. Often she seems to be providing a textbook example of confession as self-exoneration. Negri had been accused by many people of doing many unpalatable things. She had to prove that she had truly loved Valentino and not betrayed his memory; that she hadn’t abandoned her native Poland; that she had never been Hitler’s mistress ...”

“... features such as carriage-lamps or stone lions, often having more to do with the resident’s self-image than with the architecture. Grandeur has its obligations: if your three epigraphs are from Antigone, Bunyan (Grace Abounding) and Goethe (Faust Part Two), you’d better follow through with something formidable – as Under the Volcano does. Joseph ...”