“... economic thought is shaky, they also fail to grasp why Keynes rejected the idea that markets are self-stabilising. Throughout Animal Spirits they portray him as reintegrating psychology with economic theory. No doubt this was one of Keynes’s goals, but it is not his most fundamental revision of economic orthodoxy. Among his other accomplishments he was the ...”

“... Without being timid about his own artistic worth, he largely resisted the normal mechanisms of self-promotion. He turned down the Légion d’Honneur (while accepting foreign honours with no cachet in Paris), refused to have anything to do with musical cliques, detested deference or homage, and was so secretive (if that’s the right word for simply not ...”

“... policy in the Middle East since World War Two: naivety compounded by miscalculation and domestic self-interest, creating situations that Washington attempts to redeem by plunging deeper into only dimly understood conflicts. In 1956, problem number one for the US in the Middle East was Nasser, the charismatic, capricious and very ambitious Arab ...”

“... with books, perhaps, or at least ‘high’ literature, that drives so much of Werther’s self-image. He loves poetry, especially Homer and Ossian but also Lessing and Klopstock. His story raises the question of whether too much reading, or a certain kind of reading, is healthy or dangerous for the unformed personality. Rousseau had asked the same ...”

“... provided with girlfriends. We know from Slipstream, Howard’s autobiography, that Louise is a self-portrait. Something like this seems to have happened with her father, and perhaps she blamed her mother (women’s ‘frigidity’ has been made to answer for a lot), though the shadow fades in the later books, almost as if it’s been forgotten. And the ...”

“... promotion of his own work and that of his coterie, does style really mean much more than self-advancement? In one way, no. With its emphasis on the men and women who populated the scene in London between 1908 and 1917, Verse Revolutionaries is decidedly about the pursuit of what Pound called ‘the white stag, Fame’. He had a knack for it. As a ...”

“... classicism during that era, its preoccupation with rhetoric, and a supposed revival of Greek self-consciousness in the aftermath of absorption into the Roman Empire. Grecophone culture in the early empire was, however, extraordinarily diverse: how could a single formula (however hazily defined) capture such varied figures as the erotic novelist Achilles ...”

“... isn’t happy, how can we be? Freud, in accordance with his reality principle (good title for a self-help bestseller, there), explained that the aim of psychoanalysis was to transform ‘hysterical misery into common unhappiness’. That, like ‘good enough’ mothering, always seemed a reasonable and graceful objective. But Rubin is more ambitious and ...”

“... the decision to make New Orleans the new capital, unless one considers cunning in the service of self-interested ambition an ineluctability of history.’ Certainly Bienville’s self-interest was important, but does any historian not consider human self-interest an ‘ineluctability of ...”

“... She’s just as persuasive now in throwing doubt on the other prime suspect, a ‘would-be wit and self-serving layabout’ called William Hatchett – which leaves Hatchett with a single surviving claim to fame, as author of A Rehearsal of Kings … with the Unheard of Catastrophe of Macplunderkan, King of Roguomania, one of the anti-ministerial farces that ...”

“... his spiritual despond. In a twinkling he has reconciled God and Darwin. Thereafter his magnificent self-confidence never flags, his melodious voice booms on, wowing sympathetic audiences all over the world. In 1946, already into his seventies, he gave a prizefighter’s salute to a crowd of thirty thousand inside and outside Madison Square Garden, eclipsing ...”

“... letters make clear how far from reality both the public perception and to some extent the private, self-deprecating persona were. For one thing Fitzgerald was clearly a writer all her life: her correspondence from the beginning was a playground, and at times perhaps a refuge, in which she created characters and drew a narrative thread through the random events ...”

“... sane person is able to make choices’; ‘sanity is nothing if not the capacity and talent for self-recognition’; ‘sanity becomes the guardian of our preferred version of ourselves’; ‘the sane can . . . get on with people.’ And then, more questionably: ‘sanity means loving oneself in exactly the right way’; ‘sanity is often bound up with ...”

“... a Yiddish version of the old generous comedy of human types, becomes something much more rarefied, self-conscious and pinched. It also takes Ozick a lot of literature to produce a little literature. As much as Borges or John Barth, she is a metafictional author: her subject is books and writers; obsessive readers, people driven to distraction by fiction. Lars ...”

“... to identify oneself as a member of the cognoscenti, it does seem an exaggeration of scholarly self-restraint not to dwell on what Hobbes called ‘a perseverance of delight’ which was its own reward. I suspect that Kenny’s reservations are methodological. He is openly suspicious of the generalisations of other historians (mostly Continental): he ...”