“... the matter of making money, the new monopolists and bureaucrats have shed embarrassment, shame and self-discipline. Everyone knows about ‘fat cats’ but few identify two recent sources of their fat – both innovations of the Thatcher years. The first is the ‘remuneration committee’, made up of non-executive directors, which, usually with the help of ...”

“... She concentrates on 17th-century Holland, where one particular stance – indicating, she thinks, self-possession – almost achieved the ‘status of a national attribute’. A surprisingly large proportion of militia company portraits include one or more figures with an arm pugnaciously akimbo: usually not the commanding officer, who might consider himself ...”

“... of his character. ‘For most of his life,’ Woodhouse writes, D’Annunzio’s sole concern was self-gratification and glory: to make hit existence as interesting and preferably as joyful as possible for himself, whatever the consequences for others; to create a work of art from his life and to immortalise it in words. There were, it is true, moments when ...”

“... period, a lawless Wild West of unmeaning and misunderstanding that was at some point tamed by the self-discipline and integrity of politicians and the formation of the national media which until recently we held in such high regard. This second assumption is equally misguided. Politicians have always lied, or half-lied, and the media has always leaned one way ...”

“... after Hiroshima – whose political involvements were intense and important to their sense of self. Fermi loved hiking, the outdoor life and manly physical games; he had pub-quiz-winner tendencies about all sorts of scientific things. He insisted on being recognised as the smartest person in any room – the alpha male who discovered the nature of beta ...”

“... and directors, and will very likely be heard in due course at Branagh’s own, gives this ending a self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness which further align it with the habits of the last plays. It is a little inconvenient for accounts of Shakespeare’s last period that insist on explaining it in terms of a return to ...”

“... had been. But a polype could also be a cancerous tumour; and the notion of the LCS as a cancerous, self-replicating, uncontrollable growth, whose numbers ‘exceed the powers of probable computation’, is everywhere in the descriptions of the Society by ministers and crown lawyers. Two things about the Government’s attitude to the organisation of the LCS ...”

“... Spark performs a perpetual disowning and reowning of creaturely and particularly writerly self-loss: to write or to speak is to borrow a power capable of being turned unnervingly against one, and autobiographical connection yields not security of possession but a sense of the uncanny. Spark’s fiction seems not merely to recall her life but – just ...”

“... It was not a ‘harbinger of the downfall of Communist power’, in his view, but a carefully self-limiting revolt which accepted that Communism could not be overthrown. ‘The developments in Poland were a stirring prologue to the narrative of Communism’s collapse, but they remained a sideshow. The real story was elsewhere.’ In other words, not in ...”

“... oil and water. Southern Rhodesia was a white-settler-dominated colony that had enjoyed effective self-government (for the whites) for thirty years. In London it came (nominally) under the Commonwealth Relations Office, which otherwise looked after places like Australia and Canada. Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, on the other hand, were ruled by the more ...”

“... with very pale tights’ look like ‘pigs’ trotters’, apparently, but ‘clothes are about self-expression’ so ‘feel free to ignore all of the above.’ The most straightforwardly entertaining parts of the book are those in which Picardie uses her press credentials to enter the dim, gothic world of European high fashion, with its ...”

“... The ‘New York School’ poets’ apparent independence from worldly concerns, their elaborate self-reference and slippery in-jokes, can make the world of the Cedar Tavern seem – in retrospect – a sort of Arcadia in itself. Lehman offers a guided tour. Chapters on Ashbery, O’Hara, Koch (‘our funniest poet … a protean comic genius’) and Schuyler ...”

“... view; it is a live dramatisation of its author’s own doubts. It still feels like a kind of self-testing, with LUI taking the materialism that Diderot espoused as the licence for his own amoral pursuit of appetite, his cynical parisitism and his entertaining satire on the enfeebled ideals of virtue to which MOI still clings. You could say it was a ...”

“... however, seems dispiriting rather than scintillating – dispiriting because it is a chronicle of self-indulgence and sometimes callousness, dispiriting all the more because it is being repeated. It could, to be sure, have been a little less depressing. MacCarthy readily misses opportunities to doubt any of his wife Annabella’s accusations and insinuations ...”

“... death, had to be reprinted four times within the year. Outraged by what he saw as her malice, her self-serving and her inaccuracy, Boswell set instantly to work on his Life of Samuel Johnson, the defects in his own records of Johnson’s conversation supplied by a biographical imagination ‘strongly impregnated with the Johnsonian aether’. Mrs Thrale ...”