“... speak made me shudder. It is not womanly to thrust yourself before the world.’ Extraordinary ‘self-assurance’ was the quality picked out by Gladstone, when, as prime minister, he took time off to review Besant’s autobiography in 1893. He attributed it to the lack of a sense of sin, which enabled her to change direction without a qualm. For ...”

“... worldly wisdom, but rather tries to employ modern philosophy against itself, proving it to be self-refuting. To mount his counter-attack Hamann relies on Hume, whose works he had discovered in London and whom he would later translate into German. (Kant eventually read Hume in this translation, thus giving Hamann an indirect role in developing the critical ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... more important, perhaps, than it seems to us today. He was shamelessly egotistic and his self-importance attracted readers to the theatrical excitements he publicised. In his autobiographical Ego books he was less candid than Hazlitt was, but then he risked imprisonment. James Harding reveals Agate as a reckless hunter after unlawful pleasures. It is ...”

“... a bra. Seymour Levin the ex-drunkard and Gregor Samsa the bug ingeniously embody acts of colossal self-travesty, affording both authors a weirdly exhilarating sort of masochistic relief from the weight of sobriety and dignified inhibition that was plainly the cornerstone of their staid comportment. With Malamud as with many writers, exuberant ...”

“... quote), there is something of envy of real poetry. Is Vansittart himself a frustrated poet, a poet self-miscast as a novelist? The ‘monster’ of this novel is the career diplomat Roger Kirkland, the ‘high sans peur’ without any feelings (even ill feelings), but with many appetites thus made disgusting. His function here is certainly as the focus of ...”

“... All have shat. Oh, and since our brilliance will strike mortals blind, Henceforth our imperial self will give audience only through screens And we shall never be seen.’ The counsellors bowed and trembled for their balls. They ordered to be engraved in stone on Mount Tai: ‘The Sovereign Emperor made decrees and edicts which all his subjects ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... opportunity to witness the sustained spontaneous effort of intellectual genius wrestling with its self-proposed problems.’ Perhaps this was true in many cases. But there was another kind of influence. John King, an under-graduate member of those classes and a friend, viewed Wittgenstein ‘as a man of high moral, intellectual and artistic integrity ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... unimportant incident reflects one aspect of Mr Whitlam’s character – his not always justified self-assurance – that helped to bring his period in office to such a dramatic end. Dining with this apparently happy man, or indeed reading his memoirs, which are in places hard going, it is not easy for any non-Australian to imagine either the excitement and ...”

“... is resumed, though changed in form by interruption. Zwerdling emphasises the diaspora of the self and of English society that is chillingly written into the book’s gossip: ‘Negation regularly has the last word.’ Ruotolo, in his book’s only surprising move, proceeds from his analysis of Between the Acts to claim Woolf for anarchism, though the ...”

“... succession formula is one of the key components of any political system, Putin’s stage-managed self-coronation makes it clear that Russia doesn’t have one. To leave the decision about one’s successor to the unpredictable outcome of a genuinely competitive election is acceptable only when incumbents don’t expect to lose too much if they lose. In ...”

“... of state as well as at home. All in all the young queen had more in common with her unpopular and self-indulgent uncles George IV and William IV than the fresh-faced appearance and the famous promise to ‘be good’ suggested. Courtiers and Victoria herself recorded tearful scenes and door slamming on her part and implacable calm, or the appearance of it, on ...”