“... is a recursive process, original virtue, once thrown out of equilibrium by an external cause, may self-destruct. Political virtue requires upkeep. So Honig faces a challenge similar to Runciman’s: in democracy, virtù needs to be dispersed among the populace, not merely modelled by tribunes. Honig aims to counter the vogue current in some quarters for Carl ...”

“... long after they had become desperate, disorganised and depleted rabbles. On occasion the mask of self-belief would slip, and he would confess that all was lost; at the end, he announced to his intimates, he would put a bullet through his brain. ‘We’ll not capitulate. Never. We can go down. But we’ll take a world with us.’ The German people, Hitler ...”

“... called Charlotte. True, however, by the accounts of all historians is the shattering blow to his self-esteem delivered when the Vienna Academy turned down his application to study art. ‘Too few heads. Sample drawing unsatisfactory.’ He had been fanatically certain that he would get in, and the wound of that rejection, perhaps his only solid ...”

“... were other ways of checking. Some discreet inquiries revealed that the Mugabe supporter and ‘self-styled emissary of Beelzebub’, as one British judge described him, Nicholas van Hoogstraten, had left the country on election night. One had to assume he knew something. I drove along Churchill Avenue, past Normandy and Arundel Roads and Dunkirk Drive ...”

“... it would probably have marked the beginning of the end of his premiership, well before the self-inflicted wounds of the autumn. July now seems a long time ago, and Cameron will be hoping that his Rwandan tribulations are behind him. But the lesson that any rational politician would take from his experiences is that nothing about the interconnection ...”

“... because there is no one else stupid enough to do it’. ‘Stupid’ is Lurie’s ironic bit of self-congratulation. But Coetzee wants us to see that the stupidity may be more real than the honour because the corpses really don’t care.But then the idea of honour doesn’t die just because the dogs do. What the writer doesn’t understand in Diary of a Bad ...”

“... Janice is as happy as a sandgirl, wrapped up warm inside the cosy paradise of pre-school domestic self-sufficiency. There’s a wireless to sing along to; there are butter-and-sugar sandwiches; at night, once the settee is folded out, Beth is ‘hemmed in’, stuck comfortingly in what the anxious little girl thinks of as ‘this wonderful little rat-cage of ...”

“... The date and reasons for this punishment are disputed, but it’s plausible that his glowing self-presentation in the Anabasis was constructed with one eye on his fellow townsmen. Was he hoping to be recalled? The stated aim of friendship with Cyrus bears on the nature of his narrative in another way. With the end of the Peloponnesian War, indigent ...”

“... her mother). Mitford and Romilly spent much of their time dreaming up hopelessly unrealistic and self-aggrandising schemes. One bright idea, which predictably came to nothing, was to rope in other members of the Out of Bounds group and offer themselves as an English consortium on the lecture circuit. Philip Toynbee, as Mitford explains elsewhere, was down to ...”

“... and daughter, and describes him as ‘tyrannical and paranoiac’, not to mention ‘hysterical, self-pitying, often irrational, melodramatic, verbose and manipulative’. Melograni, too, notes that Leopold was a past master at instilling guilt in his formerly model son (whose motto as a child, as he later reminded his father, was ‘Next to God comes ...”

“... There seems to be something paradoxical, even self-contradictory, in the very notion of a Reformation image. The movement of religious protest inaugurated by Martin Luther in Wittenberg in 1517 quickly targeted the veneration of images as a damnable superstition, the idolatrous confusion of gross matter with an invisible God who was pure and eternal spirit ...”

“... on former Communists and the second by the intellectual’s marriage to a demanding and ultimately self-destructive sex goddess. Despite Miller’s disingenuous claim that he had no idea people might associate this character with Monroe, the play was dismissed by a vitriolic press as tasteless, embarrassing and exhibitionist, and thrived only as a succès de ...”

“... Humphrey Jennings never lacked a sense of self-worth. Peggy Guggenheim, with whom he had a brief affair in 1937, remembered him jumping up and down on their Parisian hotel bed crying out: ‘Look at me! … Don’t you think I’m beautiful?’ In fact, she thought he looked like Donald Duck, and insisted he put his clothes on and take her to meet André Breton ...”

“... the very virtues one might think of in such a context – honour, loyalty, the capacity for self-sacrifice – are employed in the service of an exploitative empire, and therefore versions of subaltern illusion. This debate resounds throughout the novel. A wounded Indian officer fighting for the British against the Japanese in World War Two suddenly has ...”

“... is ‘neither fish, fowl nor good red herring’. In the end, Bandini decides that in her lack of self-consciousness Camilla is more authentic, ‘deeper rooted’ than himself. But this makes her unsuited to life in Los Angeles, a city of dust and fog which he thinks of as a ‘sad flower in the sand’, grown up and maintained artificially in the desert. At ...”