“... in the Nivernais’ (1849) Bonheur was a new kind of celebrity. ‘Life had taught her self-reliance,’ Hewitt writes, ‘and accepting, even flaunting, her own idiosyncrasies had become a survival mechanism.’ It had also become part of her brand. When Édouard Dubufe painted her portrait for the Salon of 1857, she insisted on replacing the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be better understood, no less than does the power exercised in and by literature. Baudrillard’s self-promoting rhetoric only frustrates such efforts, as in his use of words like ‘real’ and ‘history’. Are we to assume that in some better world than ours ‘history’ and some concept of the ‘real’ existed in a pure state, uncontaminated by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the honesty with which Russell faced the ruin of his intellectual projects and the duplicity and self-deception of his marital and extra-marital dealings. That is a harsh view. Whatever he became later, the Russell of these early letters is emotionally incompetent rather than duplicitous, self-laceratingly prim and proper ...”

“... of two distinct missions for higher education. The first mission was collegiate education, self-contained, featuring a four-year first degree, a more or less prescribed curriculum, intense classroom discussion and round-the-clock argument on great themes. (The heavily, possibly one-sided intellectual dimension of American liberal arts education ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... whom we are abhorred.’ His conduct when deluded does not accord with this in any case somewhat self-contradictory precept, and the discrepancy can be read as a sign of his insanity: but it scarcely has the force of an apology for the hurts he inflicts. This passage could be thought to link the novel with a work of the same time, Shakespeare’s ...”

“... in the private sector. The received picture is therefore one of a volatile petty-bourgeoisie whose self-hate was projected onto a hatred of others. Hitler was the little man’s strong man. The Nazis and the petty-bourgeoisie seem to have been made for each other. Professional horse-sense suggests that it is only a matter of time before historians set out to ...”

“... insist that it is their enemies who constitute a priesthood: ‘the death-of-language writers are self-ordained priests’ (James Stalker, in Greenbaum). John Silverlight, in his excerpted columns about usage and abusage that constitute Words, is prompt to make clear that he is playing down, not laying down, the law: ‘What I am not, to the disappointment of ...”

“... individual renouncements. The instinctive life of man is one of unbridled aggression and egoistic self-satisfaction. The whole structure of Culture has been designed to put prohibitions and curbs upon him.’ For Elias, as for Freud, the principle is general – sport is dragged into the argument simply by way of illustration: e.g. Roman gladiators fought one ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Exotic foods on every side. And then Air India, first class, back home! Maybe my condition was self-inflicted. Or it could have been that conference. Colitis can be set off by an allergy. Just think of all those exotic and not always compatible intellectual spices thrown together: Bella Akhmadulina and Chinua Achebe, Régis Debray and Mulk Raj ...”

“... eye – and I immediately saw that he was talking about himself as much as me, about the younger self he had been when he moved north. ‘It’s not what you think,’ he said. ‘Really. You can’t live here in splendid isolation. You may think you want that, but you don’t. You’d go mad in the end, believe me.’ He turned back to the ...”