“... It is odd how much decades matter. The Twenties evoke an unmistakable image of self-consciously post-war modernity and frivolity; the Thirties of ideological polarisation in the face of the twin challenge of depression and dictatorship; the Forties of plain living and high thinking about the world after Hitler; the Fifties of affluence and complacency and the end of ideology ...”

“... What of the ‘profound and sombre silence’ (according to one eye-witness) in which the self-appointed executioners of hundreds of ‘traitors’ (mostly priests) went about their grisly business in the Abbaye in September 1792? How, as Lynn Hunt asks, should we read the difference between the solemn and orderly trial of Louis XVI and the wild ...”

“... qualities which were never a bar to popular acclaim. Canadian-born, Jersey-reared, self-educated in the family library, young Elinor fantasised about aristocratic ancestors. A stern grandmother instilled strict moral rules. Edging ever upwards in Late Victorian society, Eleanor met many unsuitable role models, not all of them royal ...”

“... joke, on himself and others. ‘Quite a funny idea ...’ she wrote, ‘that Dwight is a kind of self-made invention or impersonation masquerading as himself.’ Well, it’s certainly true that Macdonald wore the aspect of a large and shaggy animal, not all that good at judging the master’s mood but nonetheless valued and patronised. Perhaps privately ...”

“... some of her male contemporaries, she felt herself to be a creature of her circumstances and not a self-fathered imagination. If she was unwilling to renounce her poetic ambitions altogether, she must smuggle them in under cover of playfulness or pedagogy. Although they admit that much of what Barbauld wrote ‘might be considered typical women’s ...”

“... tenth anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership. Studying Mr Major’s ‘effect’ is, however, self-evidently more difficult. Whatever one thinks of Mrs Thatcher she was undoubtedly a larger-than-life figure who, one way or another, dominated her cabinet and party. Furthermore, in 1989, though it was clear the whole enterprise was going wildly off the ...”

“... at its best usually involving some element of performance, confession, manifesto, or other form of self-declaration. The best correspondents have both a hunger for experience and the itch to communicate it: one remembers Byron, attending in Rome the beheading of three robbers, sitting near the front with his opera-glass trained on the spectacle, and insisting ...”

“... In The Orators W.H. Auden classified bird buffs as ‘excessive lovers of self’: they illustrate the psychological type who is ‘unable to taste pleasure unless through the rare coincidence of naturally diverse events, or the performance of a long and intricate ritual’. Redmond O’Hanlon sees his own career as a bird-watcher originating along similar lines to this but rather more romantically ...”

“... Central European scepticism’. This involves, Havel says, ‘a deepened sense of irony and self-irony, together with humour and black humour, and perhaps most important in this context, an intense fear of exaggerating our own dignity unintentionally to a comic degree, a fear of pathos and sentimentality, of overstatement and of what Kundera calls the ...”

“... in a stimulating introduction to a facsimile reprint of John Sym’s Life’s Preservative against Self-Killing (1637), strengthened and deepened Medieval arguments that suicide, which was seen as prompted by the Devil, was the greatest sin against God. The number of suicides reported to the court of King’s Bench had risen sharply in the early 16th century ...”

“... relationship with Jean to the comparative method of moving beyond the limitations of one’s own self-observation. E’en as the munelicht’s borrowed frae the sun I ha’e my knowledge o’ mysel’ frae thee, And much that nane but thee can e’er mak clear, Save my licht’s frae the source, is dark to me. Where Davie is surprisingly weak is on ...”

“... good place to observe all these moves. The title is terrible, of course, a bit of pastel-minded self-plagiarism, but Stendhal would probably have changed that. He considered another, worse possibility: The Rose of the North. ‘A flat and pretentious title,’ he ruefully commented, ‘which seemed fine to me yesterday.’ The work was written in ...”

“... and his followers have complained of their oscillation between use of the terms ‘fragmented self’ and ‘disintegrative anxiety’ as subjective descriptions of the patients’ experiences and as identifying the processes which underlie them. Wittgenstein was struck by the felicity of Freud’s comparison of certain dream images to a rebus. A rebus is ...”

“... there is nowhere to go but back to Pittsburgh.The chorus goes in another direction. It is both self-mocking and yearning – the lament of a man who wants to take off his mask and shout. But throughout every story in ‘Lo and Behold!’, there is really only one voice, and that voice is the mask itself – ‘a portable heirloom’, Constance Rourke wrote ...”

“... wife, Ellen Schwamm. ‘She insists that she regrets nothing. This is her discipline and self-assertion when, openly or not, one is in her charge.’ And: ‘I lived through Ellen’s will from time to time during those days. I had her agility and her subtlety vicariously. I had that merciful depth of her female ...”