“... his life thereafter. Browne goes so far as to compare his Kentish country house, Down, to a ‘self-contained, self-regulating scientific ship methodically ploughing onwards through the waves outside . . . almost as if he were on the Beagle again, sailing into some unknown port, where people felt it was a natural ...”

“... of commerce in the world’, and the British Empire had always been – at least in its self-representation – concerned overwhelmingly with trade. Hence Charles II’s abortive attempt to transform Tangier, in Pepys’s words, into the ‘most considerable place the King of England hath in the world’. Tangier is also crucial to Colley’s ...”

“... that are making the seasons fluctuate and the animals with a genius for creating enemies. All our self-destructive behaviour, whatever else we think it is, may be an attempt to put a stop to the struggle. And if we begin to hate our own struggle for survival, we may want to suppress it in others. Clearly, our capacity to destroy other species – not to ...”

“... they say. It is solving its social problems, and awaits the imminent return of some measure of self-government and respect. Why then should the planet’s most consistently stable and resourceful great city have generated so jittery an image? The answer seems to lie in a hidden equilibrium of forces that London has always been less able to articulate and ...”

“... Troy Book, composed during Henry V’s reign, were to advance the programme of Lancastrian self-representation set out by chroniclers such as Thomas Walsingham and the clerical author of the Deeds of Henry V, insistently reiterating the favoured themes of legitimacy, nationalism and orthodoxy. Yet for all their anxious loyalty, and the considerable ...”

“... father, with his filing. The Chalfens are an entertaining lot who have an incredible capacity for self-belief (their favourite word is ‘Chalfenism’), but you get the impression that more than entertainment is at stake. With their introduction, class differences are nicely bridged (racial differences were smoothed over in the opening chapters), and the ...”

“... work; there are great writers whose letters and/or diaries add up to masterpieces of self-portraiture (Byron, Woolf, Flaubert); there are, and this, too, is a contemporary phenomenon, writers who turn to fiction after an explicitly autobiographical first book. But none of those cases is quite the same as that of the novelist of established ...”

“... it: these 1200 pages of Amis Letters are merely a ‘selection’, we are told). Instead of direct self-disclosure, we get yards of leering porn – mostly to do with what lesbian schoolgirls might, or should, get up to – and a certain amount of sexual note-comparing. The two young would-be shaggers routinely swap updates on this or that girlfriend ...”

“... the Sky by Suzanne Clothier: do not follow dog-experts blindly … instincts … humanity) and self-help pundits (The Necessary Disobedience by Maria Modig, dedicated to Milgram: empowerment … taking responsibility), as well as being the source for a Peter Gabriel song entitled ‘We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)’. A French punk rock group ...”

“... what makes a painting come alive, as Coldstream was naturally aware: one of his finely turned self-deprecating lines referred to ‘the sort of configurations I make under the guise of representing what I see’. One hazard of his tactics is that for almost any spectator, even Laughton on occasion, those marks can seem to choke stretches of Coldstream’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... formulated it before him, and it requires an uncomfortable reliance on Talleyrand’s letters and self-serving memoirs. Lawday also has a shaky grasp of non-Talleyrandian French history. Louis XV did not ‘rule the country according to the unbudging feudal concepts of his Bourbon forefathers’. Louis XVI was his predecessor’s grandson, not his son, was ...”

“... present-day relevance of their subject. That history shapes us and our world ought to appear so self-evident as to set it above tie-ins with newspaper headlines. Yet history never repeats itself exactly; and while ‘lessons can be learned’ from the past, one can always conjure a multitude of pasts to choose from. Presents, too. A basic classroom lesson ...”

“... seriousness. In trading rooms there’s an extraordinary, almost demonic fusion between the self-serving, relentless pursuit of profit, and some of the higher reaches of abstract thought, as embodied in the teams of post-doctoral mathematicians and physicists employed by every big bank. And for the competitive, simplistic characters who tend to be ...”

“... petits-fours. In her memoirs, she says more than her modern biographers about the ingenuity and self-discipline required of a salonnière: ‘One had to give up being oneself and devote oneself – and other people – entirely to the cult of the great man . . . to tie up all the threads which, from those divergent vanities, had to lead back to the same ...”