“... is it yet entirely extinct: well read, there is still in it light enough to exhibit its own self; nay to diffuse a faint authentic twilight some distance round it. Not every item in the Duke-Edinburgh edition seems quite to count as a ‘burning beacon’, but, as this sample of Carlyle’s prose may suggest, the level of sheer verbal force and ...”

“... exact, but his mild-mannered arguments culminate in emphatically radical conclusions. His sober, self-effacing prose leads the reader through a series of intricate theoretical inquiries until the trap is suddenly sprung and one is faced with the most provocative claims: chaos and tumult are to be applauded; the more nihilistic the world grows, the better; we ...”

“... otiose or actively misleading annotations and, above all, the fatuous commentary of a cynical, self-satisfied authorial persona whose only real interest is in multiplying print commodities and, therefore, his income. The aesthetics of obscurity is his greatest resource. ‘It is with Writers, as with Wells,’ he tells us. The thing to do with a shallow ...”

“... differed little from James VI of Scotland,’ Doran is not concerned with how James’s English self diverged from his Scottish one, but with the ways in which he differed – or didn’t – from Elizabeth, his fellow monarch and godmother, whom he never met, but with whom his relations had been complex and often fraught, despite the diplomatic amity ...”

“... and desires, but also in their refusal to pass judgment on them, no matter how irrational or self-limiting. They used their own incoherent desires as raw material. In The Hundreds, co-written with Kathleen Stewart, Berlant includes an experiment called ‘This Week in Shakes’ that documented the taste of ‘virtue breakfasts’ – protein shakes of ...”

“... the Clutter Image Rating (2008), a diagnostic tool designed by Frost and Steketee to replace vague self-definitions of hoarding with a more objective measure. The CIR consists of images of different interiors – kitchen, bedroom, living room – which are progressively filled with objects. In the first picture of the living room the space is more or less ...”

“... remaining as jolly and animated as a ventriloquist’s puppet.’ As a child, full of anger and self-loathing, Jesse attempted his own ritual of erasure: taking a Brillo pad to his skin, he ‘put the hot tap on until it ran scalding and set to scratching off the black’.Jesse’s adolescence coincides with the rise of rap and R&B. Suddenly his skin colour ...”

“... Folly herself utter the speech in praise of folly, producing as he did so various paradoxes of self-reference. Burton, it might be said, in some degree follows the Erasmian lead in that, even as he offers an analysis of melancholy which is so zestful as to sound at times like a celebration, he presents himself as melancholy: Melancholy praising ...”

“... and stylish. Yet Freud for Historians is crippled by its restriction to what Gellner calls ‘the self-maintaining circle’ of psychoanalysis. As a convert, a successor, Gay simply puts aside the evidence of Eysenck and others that analysis is therapeutically unremarkable. Nor is he troubled by historical and cultural variety: all human life came to 19 ...”

“... they were an important element in the rhetoric and appeal of Fianna Fail, a potent mixture of self-interest and idealism. Fine Gael people, we believed, never dreamed. The first two leaders of the Fianna Fail Party, Eamon de Valera and Sean Lemass, had fought in the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War. Their agenda was nationalist ...”

“... insistence that his superior intellect entitled him to her unqualified service as a form of self-abasement that perpetuated the most conventional elements of male domination, and embraced women’s secondary status. And with the rise of Post-Structuralist feminist theory, Beauvoir has been criticised as an old-fashioned thinker and ...”

“... only industry to have commercialised the Occupation. There is a long tradition of journalists and self-styled historians arriving in the Islands in search of dirt on it – and being taken far more seriously than they deserved. A writer calling himself Peter Tombs came in the mid-Seventies, promising many of the same sensational revelations as Bunting, only ...”

“... victim – Novak was stoical, obdurate, or sullen. She allowed very few barriers between that raw self and the audience and now looks dignified, reflective, and responsive to feeling where Monroe appears haphazard and oblivious. Novak is the epitome of every small-town waitress or beauty contest winner who thought of being in the movies. Despite a thorough ...”

“... words as exact as those of the stones in the tower itself. Auden had a beady eye for the laxity of self-indulgence, even when, as occurs in Hardy’s poems, it is a part of their personal engagingness. ‘I never cared for life: life cared for me,’ writes Hardy, and Auden commented: ‘What – never? Come, come, Mr Hardy.’ The line of poetry and the ...”

“... of at least one blackmail attempt. ‘Please seize the event, however delicate the problem,’ the self-important Fullerton once advised another potential biographer of Wharton, ‘to dispel the myth of your heroine’s frigidity.’ The advice is offensive, but it has to be conceded that the detailed documenting of the woman’s sexual awakening has ...”