“... though no proof was adduced. Enrolling at the Institute of Transport Engineers in 1880, he set up self-education groups among the students, and in the same year joined Narodnaia Volia. The organisation – its name means ‘People’s Will’, though it is occasionally rendered as ‘People’s Freedom’ – was formed in the summer of 1879; its first aim ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Michel Foucault’s Folie et déraison, Erving Goffman’s Asylums and R.D. Laing’s Divided Self, which, along with Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness, also published in 1961, were set to become iconoclastic classics. There is a revealing passage in History of Madness in which Foucault proposes that ‘the knowledge of madness supposes in the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he writes of community in another letter to Goodyer, Donne presents it as only part of a regime of self-tuning, in which withdrawal into melancholic loneliness and participation in society must alternate, as though either alone would swamp him: Sometimes when I finde my self transported with jollity, and love of company, I ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... persons of Caesar and narrator coincided. At any rate, the experience instilled in my childhood self a (not articulated) sense, residual still, that there might be a mystical, if misty, relationship between reading and power. Francis Spufford, a third of the way into The Child that Books Built, tells the following story: I learnt to read around my sixth ...”

“... to theory rather than philosophy: the latter is always haunted by the dream of some foolproof self-sufficient system, a set of interlocking concepts which are their own cause. This dream is of course the after-image of philosophy as an institution in the world, as a profession complicit with everything else in the status quo, in the fallen ontic realm 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 ...”

“... just as King had done after ousting Bartholomew, he inherited his victim’s job. Treachery and self-aggrandisement were part of the natural order of things in what Ruth Dudley Edwards, in this double biography of Cudlipp and King, comically describes as the glory days of Fleet Street. The two men had very little in common. Cudlipp, the youngest son of a ...”

“... from the fit, less from the unfit – that is the chief issue of birth control.’ Eugenics, or ‘self-directed evolution’ as it was styled by its proponents, signalled the way towards a utopian future. In 1913, that promise acquired human form with the birth in London of a ‘eugenic baby’, the product of careful breeding. She was christened ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”