“... historians use other definitions. I’m inclined to believe that ‘free labour’, understood as self-ownership, is more useful. Wage labour is a reasonable definition, however, and it helps clarify much of what was at stake in the Civil War. This precise definition of capitalism, however, coexists uneasily with their use of ‘slavery’ as a catch-all ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that the 30 per cent who held out had ‘better coping skills, were more socially competent, self-assertive, trustworthy, dependable and academically successful’. It’s this willingness to open up the expected format that makes Murder at Wrotham Hill so compelling about its time and the attitudes of those living in it, rather than simply a voyeuristic ...”

“... milk over soft white bread Late style here means spare fragments, scattered memories and some self-disgust. (In the US, ‘crèche’ means a Nativity scene rather than the place you drop off children.) Other new poems are lists, ‘slowly repetitiously’, as Rich admits, cataloguing reasons for outrage. She has a sense that she has said it all ...”

“... contrary to his image he spent much of his teens, twenties and early thirties on a determinedly self-improving trajectory: an apprenticeship in TV repair in Leith, then an electrical engineering course in London; clerical work for Hackney council, then a computing MSc; a successful spell as a North London property developer; then better council work back in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... not merely the ineluctable and ‘tragic’ mysteries of passion, but rather passion as a form of self-importance. God may be dead or dying but passion is not; and passion is now the Great Dictator. This, of course, makes Márai rather more of a writer of his time, a writer wary of the rhetoric of the self-aggrandising. For ...”

“... for the country remained his line. He was not much of a joiner. He did sign up with the ‘self-consciously elitist’ and purportedly non-political Anglo-German Fellowship in 1935, but, Kershaw writes, he was not one of its more active members. He had no connection with any of the pro-German groupuscules fired by rabid anti-semitism or inspired by ...”

“... attitudes to these and other related matters are based on selfish fantasies and expressed in self-serving cant. His plan is to blow them away with the breath of common sense. To answer the question asked in his title he begins at the beginning: since we attach so much importance to the idea, what, in fact, constitutes a work of art? It’s a newfangled ...”

“... foundations of institutional philanthropy. But no less important was her extraordinary gift for self-dramatisation and storytelling, the capacity to imagine and live her own life as an epic. Like other eminent Victorians, More inspired a loathing in later generations more or less proportional to the veneration she received from her own. Stott acknowledges ...”

“... Hitler’s ‘modern’ enthusiasms. Kershaw’s Hitler is a cold, asexual, hollow personality, a self-absorbed man convinced of his own genius. He was capable of charm, but also touchy, suspicious and prone to sudden fits of anger. The Swedish industrialist Birger Dahlerus witnessed one of these when a letter from Lord Halifax was delivered to the ...”

“... the ‘inflexible etiquette’ of form (‘Misguided Angel’) with the besieged contemporary self. Ford is the cartoonist of the soul’s adventures, but the cartoons have a deadly underside of seriousness: I lay emptied as a fallen Leaf until startled awake by a blinding flash Of dry lightning, and the onset of this terrible thirst. (‘Twenty-Twenty ...”

“... be absolutely strict and pure.’ Nowhere is this paradoxical combination of uncontrolled rage and self-conscious formal absorption better captured than in the 1993 documentary film about Bourgeois directed by Nigel Finch for Arena Films. It is in fact a collaborative performance piece staged by Bourgeois and the director which successfully enacts the ...”

“... seems to want in art, in experiencing it, is the same thing that is necessary for its creation, a self-forgetful, perfectly useless concentration.’ A tiny poem, ‘The Thin Man’, in Justice’s second collection, Night Light (1967), outlines a similar aesthetic credo: I indulge myself In rich refusals. Nothing suffices. I hone myself to This ...”

“... sense, Augie is definitely a fake, or rather a ‘living conjuring trick, a work of implausible self-transformation’, with his false teeth and outmoded American slang. He gave himself the name Vanags, which means ‘hawk’ in Latvian, during the war. ‘It authenticated him as a gentile and gave him a native land.’ ...”