“... seen the light.’ He also owns another house not quite so splendid but very lucrative. Another self, an alter ego, the billionaire that he might have become had he stayed in ‘monstrous’ New York, begins to emerge as he negotiates the contracts on his property development project. The house on the jolly corner he leaves empty of furniture, but filled ...”

“... lets Eunice down his ‘souvenirs’, those ‘exercises of memory’ so precious to his sense of self, would ‘stink’. ‘A good American makes propaganda for whatever existence has forced him to become.’ Ijah makes no propaganda for what he has become – a legal and political adviser to bankers on foreign loans. He prefers to interest himself in the ...”

“... to think that a sign-relation is built into nature is to revert to the idea that there are ‘self-identifying objects’ and ‘species’ there ... Such an idea made sense in the context of a Medieval world view ... In the context of a 20th-century world view, by contrast, to say in one’s most intimidating tone of voice ‘I believe that causal ...”

“... 15 of his 53 years as a tinplate worker, and six more (and very valuable ones they were for his self-education) immured in Dorchester Jail. This is a well-researched and notably sympathetic study of a difficult man. Its limitations are partly due to Wiener’s narrow focus and partly inseparable from his hero. Apart from his publicist ventures in the late ...”

“... big enough.’ Her women respond to these indignities with genuine bewilderment and, sometimes, self-treachery, self-deceit. ‘Nobility was the attribute Kathleen invented for Cade.’ Sometimes they finally summon up indignation. ‘I’m free, Doctor. I’m not loose. I am free. Can you perceive, Doctor, that there is ...”

“... a poem whose length, metrical regularity and sheer industriousness were meant to mock the brief, self-expressive, somewhat enervated ‘free verse’ of the bards who occupied its centre-stage. James, the newly ‘arrived’ innocent, had been genuinely shocked by the Literary World’s other-worldliness, and repelled by the drab limitedness of what his ...”

“... of academics, was well aware that the muse can be overpowered and seduced. In his Memoirs and self-adulatory campaign narratives, Montgomery enhanced his own undeniably great achievements by denigrating Auchinleck’s generalship and by exaggerating the poor condition of the Eighth Army when he assumed command in August 1942. Montgomery’s version of the ...”

“... and spasmodic reactions to war and revolution. It might be clearer to say that he made them feel self-conscious about their lapses into commitment. And self-consciousness, often of the most exorbitant kind, has been the thing ever since. Was Wolfe just having fun at the expense of the smart set? He certainly worked hard at ...”

“... the idea of remembering the names of great masters, and hence the very idea of art history, the self-conscious pursuit of originality in art – these are all topics which, Alsop rightly insists, cannot be explored without reference to art-collecting. Much of his book consists of an outstandingly thorough investigation of the growth of art-collecting and ...”

“... than it may seem. History is occasionally decided by it. One would like to know how the balance of self-esteem stands between SAS, Marine commandos and Paras after the Falklands war. Clarke describes in detail the nastiness and toil of the soldier’s lot in Northern Ireland. He may be lying up in some hidden observation post, excreting into plastic ...”

“... it’s inextricably linked with Oskar’s human failings. His goodness seems inseparable from his self-indulgence, his appetites for cognac and women, his skill at black-marketeering, his talent for not merely cultivating but actually enjoying the company of the murderous Plaszow camp commandant – ‘drinking with the devil’: ‘He’s always been a man ...”

“... book was published in 1958. Is he right to look back at the growth of the Welfare State as ‘a self-liquidating political movement’? The coming of adult male suffrage was a key event in Europe. The poor now had votes. It was all the more necessary for property to pay its ‘ransom’. In Britain, Lloyd George was the greatest exponent of radical ...”

“... and easier reading if he had not, like Richard Humphreys on the London years, limited himself so self-effacingly to the documentation, necessary thought that is. The problem, for instance, of Pound’s admiration for Brancusi, and of how that fits or does not fit with his other proclivities and principles, cannot for much longer be left where Alexander ...”

“... callow Yankee ornithologist, a mild obsessive with a strong sense of timing and no instinct of self-protection whatever; he goes where the bird song calls him and reports his experiences with what seems like false naivety but may be the expression of genuine innocence. His previous book was a collection of random if passionate notes on owl sightings in ...”

“... by the use of experiments to authorise scientific theories: for experiments were the preserve of a self-appointed group of professionals whose claim to authority was no better than those of the other groups which Hobbes devoted his life to attacking – notably the clergy of an established church. At a deeper level, however, Shapin and Schaffer also believe ...”