“... 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.’ ...”

“... on the windswept islands to the north. The sealer communities provided a model of anarchic self-sufficiency. As one observer lamented in 1817, They are complete savages, living in bark huts like the natives, not cultivating anything, but living entirely on kangaroos, emus and small porcupines, and getting spirits and tobacco in barter for the skins ...”

“... of school desegregation as oppressors. In a peculiarly American version of victimology and self-reinvention, they invoked their ancestors’ tales of workplace signs that read ‘No Irish Need Apply,’ and claimed that through hard work and gumption they had risen above oppression while blacks continued to wallow in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”