“... precepts into practice. The Courtier can be seen – from one point of view – as the ultimate self-consuming artefact. Supposedly practical, it leaves an attentive reader helpless to carry out the enterprise for which it claims to provide practical guidance (all later etiquette books reveal the same disjunction between form and function). Like ...”

“... Iceland had conquered Haggard before Haggard penetrated to Iceland; and through Haggard the Viking self-image reached generations of Empire-builders. Meanwhile in France the likes of Gobineau (who claimed Norman blood) were writing ‘Roman, Welsh ... whoever is not born German has been born to be a servant’; Baudelaire was getting away with drivel like ...”

“... purposes like livestock.’ The objective is to abolish native title, Aboriginal benefits and self-determination, along with multiculturalism and immigration. In order to avert the ‘danger’ of Australia ‘being swamped with Asians’, an ancient blood libel is peddled once again, with a sensational lack of logic. If native title is ...”

“... own terms, a process Emerson traces in a chapter devoted to his gradual entrance into literary self-consciousness. After Stalin’s death in 1953, Russian criticism slowly revived from the years of terror, and a good deal of archival research was done on Bakhtin, which is still continuing. Several early works, notably his remarkable essays on the ...”

“... without worrying too much what he is writing about. One of those elephantine Hunter S. Thompson, self-cannibalising careers that define the point where it all went wrong, where the floating signifier began to get above itself and spit like a snake. Penman’s value lies in the way he occupies this clerical post, as reporter, commentator, without feeling the ...”

“... she is not forgotten. Her portrait of herself and her daughter Julie, now in the Louvre, and her self-portrait in the National Gallery are likely to be recognised, even if people do not remember who they are by. ‘Until a few decades ago,’ Angelica Goodden writes, Vigée Le Brun ‘seemed to many lovers of painting beside the point, charming and seductive ...”

“... other vigilantes (while remaining strictly neutral in labour disputes), and above all to encourage self-help by devolving the day-to-day running of the camps onto committees of campers elected by the migrants themselves. According to Shindo, however, both the democracy and the respect for the migrants’ dignity were a sham: the managers always had the last ...”

“... next to people who had gone to convent school and Rada, nice people but different, loosely self-conscious and super-educated and social in a way the Northerners had never seen. I met Alan Sillitoe in the 1990s, and he was still shy, still standing at the edge of the party. But it was Storey who most powerfully understood the price of the journey, the ...”

“... by Palestinians outside the territories, just as they were slow to recognise how independent and self-reliant the population of ‘endurers’ had become in the process of creating a civil society – including schools, universities, hospitals, sports teams and theatres –under occupation. Subtly, Shehadeh admonishes the Diaspora for its continuing failure ...”

“... lost his father’s religious framework as a young man but read avidly in theology, philosophy and self-improving literature, searching for another set of values to shape his existence. He found one in the duty of work – for its own sake, but also in order to understand the underlying order of the world and ‘discern its harmonies’, as he put it in a ...”

“... In those files, as I found from my own Polish dossier, it’s not only a younger half-forgotten self that you meet. It is also an unrecognisable stranger – yourself, as others have seen you. For nearly thirty years, hundreds of thousands of people have been reading their secret police files, the records of surveillance, denunciation and manipulation ...”

“... special operators from the War on Terror years have specialised in a different genre: the business self-help manual. These former military officers feel that a career spent planning deadly missions and leading men into messy wars makes them uniquely qualified to offer ‘Battle-Tested Strategies for Creating Successful Organisations and Inspiring Extraordinary ...”

“... tone usually adopted by studies of media institutions and mergers and tycoons, it has a seam of self-deprecation running through it, which reminds you intermittently that Panorama has been an enterprise with important strengths and weaknesses, and that these have something to tell us about the broader journalistic culture and society that produced it. In a ...”

“... is a protean idea of a person, rather confused, rather desperate, but complete in his devotion to self-authorship. His every move shows him to be a modern conundrum about race and identity and selfhood. He might make us laugh, but he might also frighten us into recognising the excesses we demand of those we choose to entertain us. For my money he also ...”

“... to think that all these hours, when my days are full of vigour and my hands and soul craving for self-expression, I am bound, chained to this fiendish mangling-machine, without . . . hope of deliverance . . . I despair of ever writing excellent poetry. I can’t look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do. My mind is so cramped and dulled ...”