“... 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 ...”

“... which sowed the seeds of our present uncertainties. Until about 1800 the lineaments of national self-identity were fairly clear, but during the 19th century what it was to be British or English became a far more contested question. This was partly because the rise of manufacturing towns mocked the roast beef and Plymouth Hoe images of the ‘olden ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sexual unease is one of the dominant themes of Goodbye to All That, a book that charts as self-consciously as, say, To the Lighthouse, the transition from Victorianism to modernity. Given his period and class, Graves’s arrested development sounds standard enough, but it seems that it also reflected his strait-laced German mother’s high Protestant ...”

“... the end more of a failure than it is a triumph. But in the face of the spiteful scorn of the more self-consciously temperate members of the academy, it is in many ways a magnificent – even an enviable – failure. Like Rousseau, Unger thinks well of the potentialities of virtually every human being (at least at some stage in their lives), but poorly of ...”

“... likely to talk than his brother was. And the whole scene betrays an intense cultural delight in self-control, impassivity, grinning in the face of torture. But how did this sort of thing work through to a rank-and-file member of a Viking army (or come to that to a ‘royal Scandinavian general’, to use James’s phrase for the sons of Ragnar ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the world. Yet the growth of the historian’s mind, so to speak, never reduces itself to tiresome self-contemplation. On the contrary, Hobsbawm’s solutions to the problems of his own epistemology become part of his quest for knowledge. This emergent global consciousness is at its most memorable in the opening of The Age of Empire, where he records the ...”

“... whose work has done more perhaps than any of the others’ to shake the coherence and conscious self-certainty of the modern liberal self. The omission of Marx and Lenin is a different matter. Holmes is quite explicit about the need to establish a distinct category of ‘non-Marxist anti-liberalism’ and I think he is ...”

“... told in group settings which diffuse the sense of dange’ and guilt (a bit like contemporary self-help support groups). Bruno Bettelheim noted (in The Uses of Enchantment) the comfort that even a solitary telling can bring to a child who realises that other people have told and heard the tale and, presumably, have also experienced the threatening ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to confirm this reading: ‘He was a kind of nothing, titleless.’ Nice joke, but a trifle self-regarding. But then who else is an autobiographer to regard, and the first sight is wrong anyway. A title can make you another kind of nothing rather than a something, and we shouldn’t rush past the difference between being titled and being entitled. When ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”