“... Proust despised for having supposed in his philistinism that the writer’s social and creative self were one and the same, that the person you dined and talked with in the cafés or salons was the same person who went home and wrote the Fleurs du mal or Madame Bovary. Proust insisted on two selves for the true writer, a surface ...”

“... all internal opposition: high-tech Japan is leading the world into ‘a fantastic dystopia of self-emptied, idea-vacated, and purpose-lost production, consumption, and daydreaming’. Miyoshi has a distinct advantage when it comes to making such sweeping statements because, as a former Japanese subject, now a naturalised US citizen, he really is both an ...”

“... concerns the role of the Wets. This chapter, ‘Why the Moderates Lost’, involves some painful self-examination. Lord Gilmour, who admits to ‘grave dereliction of duty’, asks himself whether the Wets could have done anything else. He concludes that he himself should have resigned at the time of the 1981 Budget, and not awaited dismissal at the end of ...”

“... his detractors were. Epstein found the attitudes of critics understandable: they were a dishonest, self-serving lot. ‘It is,’ he said, ‘the almost insane hatred of the average man and woman that is baffling.’ What is it about Epstein and England that explains the rows and tetchy relationships, the ‘insane hatred’ – and, more pertinently the ...”

“... in a cinema, was, significantly, Coriolanus. Mrs Melville, wife of the vicar of Stratford, a self-confessed Fascist and anti-semite who vigorously opposed the inclusion of the Soviet flag at the Birthday ceremonies, was a governor of the Shakespeare Theatre and must therefore have had a hand in the choice of Birthday play, the hero of which shared her ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... it is the lodger who has disappeared. When sections of these houses are rented they are made self-contained. What makes Halle’s book refreshing for readers outside his discipline is that it considers art in its domestic context. Only in this way, he says, ‘can its meaning for an audience, and the nature of its links with material and social life, he ...”

“... matter. Woman is Animal. Yet, as Warner points out, Woman functions in the myths as the animal self more effectively where there is a belief in the value of the ‘civilised’. When ‘nature’ is seen as aggression, and aggression is to be highly valued – in the dog-eat-dog world of the Stock Exchange and in Robert Bly’s drum-beating – then Woman ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Mac-Donald, the argument runs, Labour stood in need of a personality who would put party above self, and Attlee fitted the bill. Yet in his quiet fashion he was skilful in managing the Party and holding it together. Hence Labour’s victory in the General Election of 1945, and the historic achievements of postwar reconstruction, were in large measure due ...”

“... essays makes no secret of its anger or its reckoning, but the praise part is pained irony, not self-pleasing sarcasm: ‘But no one else has presented it in such a lively, resourceful and energetic manner, so the best name one can find for it is the Kenner Smear.’ The second Joyce essay opens with a sentence which is exactly weighed and timed: ‘It is ...”

“... giving rise to a ramshackle form of capitalism swiftly overtaken by other countries. So much for self-help! From this angle, Barnett is no Thatcherite: he does not suppose that a return to laissez-faire in 1945 would have wrought an economic miracle. On the contrary, he believes the Churchill coalition ought to have developed a coherent industrial ...”

“... It was nearly always men whose well-earned successes the preachers of the Victorian self-help ethic borrowed for their exempla, but they could have cited instances of female authors who not only staved off destitution as portionless spinsters or unprovided-for orphans but through heroic labours paid off the debts of spendthrift, incompetent or ...”

“... where the whole of this mighty process could be comprehended. Hence world-history was Teutonic self-understanding, and part of its preparation for dominance in the coming Age of Caesarism. Although the author does not quite say so, An Unfinished History of the World is best understood along similar lines: that is, as a British Philosophy of the ...”