“... as critics have unkindly called it) may join the De Lorean, cold fusion and Clive Sinclair’s C5 self-propelled sitz-bath in the technology junkyard. ‘Electrics’ – battery-powered automobiles – have a venerable pedigree. The first successful model was exhibited at the World’s Fair in 1892. William Morrison’s dirigible boasted a four-horsepower ...”

“... that most of them suggest considerable scepticism about the very notion of the consistent inner self pursued by modern biography. Outside this inconveniently unconfessional corpus there are a few comments about Behn from contemporaries, but these, unhelpfully, tend to consist of the sort of generic male jokes about women who publish, especially women who ...”

“... in the annual salons, she also began to work on what Burke calls ‘the creation of a mannered self-image corresponding to the stylisation of her art’. Following in Oscar Wilde’s footsteps, Loy decided to become a work of art. Her first marriage, to Stephen Haweis, an English painter and photographer, was unhappy. The strain of Haweis’s numerous ...”

“... with the adoption of the Tories’ ‘eye-wateringly tight’ spending limits and New Labour’s self-denying ordinance on higher income tax even for the reviled fat cats, the message is clear: for all the talk of long-termism, the City and the financial markets will have the final say. Putting the Threadneedle Street mandarins in charge guarantees ...”

“... The out-of-control independent counsel is not Kenneth Starr but a posse partly made up of the self-appointed scientific fraud-busters Walter Stewart and Ned Feder and their patron, the Democratic Congressman John Dingell. For the excellent Linda Tripp with her concealed tape-recorder read Imanishi-Kari’s young Irish-American co-worker at MIT, Margot ...”

“... activity has always been very much more fitful. Hence a certain amount of not unjustified self-congratulation in the Apostolic ranks, and hence the divergent reactions of observers. Lubenow and his subject seem at first glance an unlikely match. Lubenow is a political historian from New Jersey, and the author of two solid books on the Liberal Party ...”

“... 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 ...”