“... the role, Zoë Wanamaker described Viola as a catalyst who comes into a world that is stuck in self-love, mourning and convention – and makes it change. Starting the play with her arrival emphasises that reading. But it underestimates the reality of Illyria. Beginning with Viola’s question about the place, rather than Orsino’s unquestioning ...”

“... their views, especially when it might be read as a declaration of faith. I always cringe at the self-importance of the genre: though open letters can sometimes exert influence, stiffly worded exhortations hardly suffice to stop states, militaries, bombs. And yet, a ‘no open letters’ policy can serve as a convenient excuse when one is hesitant to stand ...”

“... comedy riff the bell jar of a borrowed literary aesthetic. Despite the focus on reclusion and self-sacrifice, the book becomes close to overexcited when the subject is sociable, magnetic, preposterous Abravanel. It isn’t easy for a caricaturist to master watercolour. Why should he try? The techniques are hardly complementary. When Abravanel is the ...”

“... Anna his Antigone. Miller’s struggle for the succession brought to the surface the complex and self-contradictory nature of psychoanalysis as a family affair, its members united by blood, or by marriage, or by transferential bond. Jacques-Alain Miller entered Lacan’s world at a fateful moment. In October 1963, Miller, then 19, had just completed his ...”

“... epithet ‘bigot’, the validity of this description is not – as its users seem to think – self-evident. Bruce is at pains to demonstrate, for the benefit of a secular audience, that religious belief cannot be dismissed as unreasonable. It may be strictly ‘irrational’, but any sociology which failed to accept the centrality of religion in many ...”

“... which reminds them of this dark side of themselves. The usual reaction is a flood of popular self-righteous condemnation but a willingness to, with friends and acquaintances, talk over and over again the appropriate bits of the case. The interest so upsetting to Nilsen – the dog-loving, Guardian-reading Job Centre bureaucrat and former policeman who ...”

“... some people as a great journalist. But if he is, that is a tribute to the power of longevity and self-created myth. To be read for the studied perversity of one’s opinions, and the calculated outrage provoked by one’s means of expressing them, supplies celebrity of a sort. As a contribution to public knowledge and even public entertainment, though, it ...”

“... and contrary to the spirit of Dylan’s songs with their continued insistence on the virtues of self-reliance – ‘Trust yourself,’ ‘You don’t need a weatherman/ To know which way the wind blows ...’ Williams is absolutely, and even touchingly, sincere in his homage, but his heart-felt devotion only rarely throws up worthwhile insights into his ...”

“... 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 ...”