“... is a heavy load, or ‘noyous for to carye’, as the garrulous English eagle complains. That self-effacing joke is typical of Chaucer, and it isn’t the only time he remarks on his chubbiness, but it may also express a kind of phonic national modesty. Italian is an easier language in which to fly than English. It has a higher frequency of liquid ...”

“... and Ireland in 1800, the north-eastern counties, with their Protestant majority, became the most self-consciously British region of the United Kingdom. By the same token, Britishness of the Ulster kind – Orange parades and kerbsides painted red, white and blue – seems demonstrative and stridently un-British. To the summer visitor from Britain who pulls ...”

“... he watched the ruling family and their friends doing business and enjoying themselves. Ahmed was a self-confident man, not noticeably intimidated by the sporadic shooting which was keeping most people in Tripoli off the streets. I asked him if he would consider working for me as a guide and assistant and he agreed. Tripoli had run out of petrol but he quickly ...”

“... of the company were situated – which portrayed Fox as an Oriental despot. The blatantly self-serving enormities of the East India Bill brought about the defeat of the measure and the downfall of the coalition by the end of 1783. Behind the scenes George III put pressure on MPs to reject the bill, but the overthrow of the unnatural coalition was ...”

“... Holocaust, except that Urwand’s villains are Hitler’s willing Jewish dupes, or perhaps even self-hating quislings. Where Hollywood and Hitler discusses the ways that Nazi Germany was represented (or not) in American newsreels and independent films, as well as the fate of German movies in the US, The Collaboration is more narrowly ...”

“... parliament, of which he had a very low opinion – but in a life so devoted to grandiloquent self-promotion there was little room for irony. He was 34 years old, and the world was at this point rather less interested in him than he imagined. Admiration of Il Vate (The Bard), as he would come to be called, was and remains an essentially Italian ...”

“... acquired state power has been overshadowed by the extraordinary story of the rise and fall or self-transformation of the regimes inspired by the October Revolution. Within little more than 30 years of Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station, Russia had become a superpower, and one third of humanity was ruled by Communist parties. There had been nothing ...”

“... of that period, chances are that it was The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I cringed for my former self when I saw Philip Kaufman’s 1988 adaptation again. Everything about it was wrong, from the opening shots of crumbling plaster and dim lightbulbs in the stairwell of a Prague tenement (three of Kundera’s bugbears in The Art of the Novel are ...”

“... the war, and did not lose the war … who had never heard of these lugubrious poets … with their self-pitying introversion? The fundamental argument advanced by Lewis, Carrington and others was that although they acknowledged the horror of the Western Front and recoiled from the misery it inflicted, they rejected the view it was either an intolerable ...”

“... The grandson of an Anglesey sheep farmer, Jones was never exactly poor: his father was a real self-made man, a brilliant mathematician who rose from charity school in Llanfechell to become vice-president of the Royal Society (introducing ‘pi’ in its modern meaning along the way). But he died before his son’s third birthday, and Jones started life ...”

“... origins in New England Puritanism, and the premium it placed on the individual’s powers of self-examination. In a number of the ‘contrarian’ essays collected in The Death of Adam (1998), Robinson mounts a vigorous defence of the Puritans and their legacy, and she shares with Reverend Ames an abiding respect for the most influential early theorist ...”

“... Shoes are literally fetishised by the extraordinary Bruno Schulz in his pictures of crouching, self-abasing men – self-portraits often – excruciated with desire at the feet and elegant shoes of fancy women holding whips or with their noses in the air. Unworldly Yeshiva boys and alarmed young Hassids encounter pairs ...”

“... sexuality, subversion, deviance, heterogeneity, popular culture, the body, the decentred self, the materiality of the sign, historicism, everyday life: this precocious post-structuralist, as Graham Pechey calls him, prefigured so much of our own times that it is surprising not to find allusions in his work to Posh and Becks. Since little of this ...”

“... that stemmed from principle, and to transform the principles of his enemies into displays of self-interest or desperation. In doing the latter he could turn out corrosive invective. One contemporary said: ‘As for his writings, there is as much difference between them and finer Invectives, as there is between a man cut with a Rasor, and spew’d ...”

“... is rather more complex than the gardens in which it results. It offers at least a fantasy of self-transformation. An accountant who spends his weekends laying York stone in the garden of his ruined manor in Somerset is imagining himself moving in two social directions at once: he enjoys pretending to be a manual worker; and he likes the idea that after ...”