“... admired, Max Wall, Tommy Cooper, Ralph Richardson. Moderation didn’t come naturally to Dad, and self-discipline needed reinforcement from outside. At various points in later life he went to a luxurious health farm – his favoured establishment was Champneys – to lose a few pounds. The regime also required abstinence from alcohol. These expensive bouts of ...”

“... But if it’s not nationalism, how should we describe England’s distinctive sense of self? Probably the most useful descriptor is Whiggism, after Herbert Butterfield’s incisive dissection in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) of the tendency ‘to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ...”

“... obliged to tell me, ‘he works all night.’ The very idea of a private life, or even of a ‘self’, with its tendency towards a possessive individualism, was alien to him. He was used to keeping open house to innumerable comrades from across the world who would turn up at short notice, expecting a bed or a floor, a meal and a conversation that went on ...”

“... for the same egoistic reasons we do – jealousy, pain, humiliation and the like. In addition, self-murder was (and still is in some cases) used in many traditional societies to protest against injustice or to shame someone. In India, China, Japan, but also in pre-Christian Europe, people would kill themselves in order to curse someone, to challenge an ...”

“... the festivities with a £1 million grant. Henry V, who didn’t go in for triumphalism or self-glorification, would probably have regarded all the fuss with disdain. The fourth volume in Jonathan Sumption’s five-volume series on the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) covers the period from 1399 to 1422, so includes Agincourt. Sumption brings his ...”

“... us in her extraordinary book, In Search of the Phoenicians: ‘They did not in fact exist as a self-conscious collective or “people”.’ Quinn’s central claim – that the concept of ‘Phoenician’ identity has for nearly three millennia been imposed from outside – is not as controversial as it may sound. Historians of the Levant and North Africa ...”

“... it is an instant trigger of distant infancy. I am sharply returned to the 1950s, to my child self. I am once again, for a fugitive moment, a New Elizabethan. This hue, which works on the colour receptor in my brain, is impervious to simulation. It is unknown both to Pantone (though it isn’t that far from 18-4537) and to the British Colour Council’s ...”

“... poets’ is the way one of their friends put it. ‘Proper thanatourists,’ they call themselves, self-deprecatingly, winningly. A combination of de Botton bonhomie and BBC breathlessness suffuses the book, particularly at the beginning, which puts us in the swanky sale room of Bonhams, where an auction is about to take place, and Auden’s manuscript of ...”

“... individualist Brexitists, think that history is the outcome of the efforts of heroic individuals (self-made men like them, free thinkers, the ‘legendary’ Boris), or, if more alt-right fascist than alt-right libertarian, the struggle between races. The collapse of this modern political epistemology and the collective ...”

“... this was hell,’ Jack says of his life, ‘no flames at all, just an eternity of disheartened self-awareness.’ He is a ‘naked man’ who also calls himself ‘the Prince of Darkness’; he may be spiritually dead, or spiritually not yet born; he is Adam in a world that has ended, instead of a world that is yet to begin. Jack is happy to describe his ...”

“... scroungers who made piles of cash out of trivial or imaginary injuries, whingers who turned their self-regarding grievances into human rights claims, and legislators and lawyers who enabled and encouraged them to do it. These have become our folk-devils.Enter, ex machina, the Secret Barrister (hereafter ‘SB’ and assumed for grammatical and syntactical ...”

“... According to Fénéon, Degas painted his nudes crouching in tubs as if their bodies were self-generated. Often posed with their backs towards us and sometimes cropped by the frame, these women also ‘externalise the viewer’, which heightens our sense of autonomy. (Michael Fried would call this ‘absorption’, while Freud might see it as ...”

“... encounters a man who looks like her dead father sitting on the floor of an empty room. Her child self is sometimes able to approach him, leaning her weight on him so that he topples over. On other nights she senses ‘warmth and softness’ coming from him, but when he begins to turn his head towards her, she starts and wakes in terror. It is, she ...”

“... first ten years of settlement.’ In another class, students were learning about the idea of the self-made man. The exemplar was Frederick Douglass. One student declared that the American Dream was a Cold War invention. Each gave a presentation on the self-made person of his or her choosing. Two chose Cristiano ...”

“... with extramission and loss, owes something to a childhood metaphysics about growth and the self. It is described very beautifully in a discussion about Hamlet and his dead father in the episode of Ulysses set in the National Library:—As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and ...”