“... capable of inordinate deceit and crafty manipulation. Yet the sense of being freed into a sexual self was a very powerful educational experience in Wharton’s life; without it one doubts whether she could have written The Age of Innocence (1920). Her major success, however, The House of Mirth, was published in 1905, well before the Fullerton affair. By the ...”

“... director at the time of Webb’s death in 1947: ‘Our founder was wiser than most and less self-regarding. Having set the School on its feet, he never attempted to impose his own views.’ But not through mere modesty. Webbian claims to superior expertise were in a sense institutionalised with the foundation of the School. Dahrendorf goes so far as to ...”

“... some lasting from noon to dawn, repeatedly insisting that detailed prescriptions would be self-defeating; that the right method was to set out the goals the courts were to achieve. By the spring of 1804 the whole project was law. The fresh codification now under way under the great conseiller Braibant is the task of a decade where Bonaparte’s ...”

“... great account of the time, Generation on Trial. He was the man who made Richard Nixon’s self-serving book, Six Crises (a ‘campaign book’ for an entire career), possible in the first place. Witness, his own work, had a marked influence on Arthur Koestler and on Czeslaw Milosz and is, indeed, the nativist American equivalent of Darkness at Noon or ...”

“... like to be as free as Westerners are, but are socially trained to think of freedom as regrettable self-indulgence. To take up such individual rights as free speech and free association can feel like putting one’s selfish desires before the interests of some group or of society as a whole. It is, as a high provincial official told Schell, ‘a clash between ...”

“... water has always held the magical power to cure. Somehow or other it transmits its own self-regenerating power to the swimmer. I can dive in with a long face and what feels like a terminal case of depression and come out a whistling idiot.’ With his trusty snorkel, he stakes out the whole of watery England for his Grail quest. Like ...”

“... what spirit, Edward Wortley recognised himself in the ironic portrait of Waitfort. The widow’s self-portrait, it should be said, is hardly more flattering. While the piece does speak up for women, it is more interested in talking back to Addison. Even before Pope’s attacks on her in the Dunciad and elsewhere made ‘confutation ... a leading imperative ...”

“... to be arrested.’ He fiercely castigates the Labour government of the 1970s for adopting ‘the self-interested politics of the marketplace’. His final disillusion runs deep, and is in marked contrast to the whole tone of the book, which is written in a racy style much like that of the Sunday Supplement memoirs of Barbara Castle, who gave him his job at ...”

“... For biography still flourishes – albeit on a reduced scale and with diminished intellectual self-confidence – both within and without the walls of academe. In one guise, it has been reincarnated as prosopography, which stresses backgrounds rather than opinions, collective behaviour in preference to individual diversity, in the (usually vain) hope of ...”

“... Eastern Europe. Straight felt that he had sold his soul to the Devil and must atone by confession, self-abasement. Societies which have been divided for centuries, familiar with the cycles of civil war, repression and patriotic compromise, are a great deal less censorious and absolute about what men and women did in their political youth. It is not strange to ...”

“... doted on brothers and followed their careers anxiously, not being given similar opportunities for self-expression through gainful employment. Yes, the Victorian world was filled with status-seekers who complained incessantly about income and nursed social slights while prattling on about duty. Yes, the young Matthew Arnold, even the aging, egregiously ...”

“... indeed fructify in abundance for the majority of people, not just for the chosen or even the self-chosen few ... ’ Crick often praises Orwell’s style, and even observes its progressive refinement. He must have been conscious throughout of a formidable reader over his shoulder: but he evidently did not ask himself how many faults Orwell would have ...”

“... and patient exploration, in which (often against much resistance and spite and lack of faith in self and life) all sorts of healthy and human potentials came to light: potentials which had somehow survived twenty years of severe Tourette’s and ‘Touretty’ life, hidden in the deepest and strongest core of the personality. This deep exploration was ...”

“... clutches an attaché case of medications to his side, ceasing abruptly from soliloquy and self-pity to gaze spellbound at his lithesome former self. At one point, Presley, who is attended around the clock by minions, halts the screening and dispatches his most obsequious aide in search of a dictionary. The testimony ...”

“... how to pick a dead drop and how not to look like James Bond, Suvorov was posted to Vienna, to that self-contained section of the Soviet Embassy called the Residency, which is headed by a GRU major-general invariably called ‘the Navigator’. He, as we learn from Shevchenko, can occupy quite a humble place in the diplomatic hierarchy, but because he is ...”