“... on their results: ‘In a country which ... after the end of the Second World War bases its moral self-understanding upon the myth of the Resistance, completely different myths suddenly spring up and transform what is “real”. This result alone is worth the cost of the research.’ How so? It is not news that for a long time the French exaggerated their ...”

“... Muslim world into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Muslims. Anti-American Iranian Shi‘ite Muslims were self-evidently bad; anti-Communist Sunni Muslims self-evidently good. The United States and Pakistan were the main powers behind the ‘anti-Soviet jihad’ but China also joined in, not only helping arm the Mujahidin but ...”

“... affect; he likes being made to feel ‘glidey’ and ‘nice’; he’s funny about the artists’ self-mythologising and bad behaviour, and irony for him is natural. The presiding angel would appear to be Gertrude Stein, in Alice B. Toklas mode, fauxnaive and paratactic, artless and kooky, the godmother of Adrian Mole. But his favourite art critic, as he ...”

“... are by Schipper’s definition conservative, and they present their tendentious opinions as self-evident truths about human nature. Layered with caustic, tongue-in-cheek ambiguity, gnomic utterances are like oracles in their contradictions and double entendres. Schipper’s working definition of the proverb ignores the issue of gnomes, but her ...”

“... and motivations of British officials’ had destroyed the ‘myths’ of the efficiency and ‘self-sacrificial esprit de corps’ of the ICS. The main problem with Spangenberg’s ‘scrutiny’ is that it ignored almost all the private papers of ICS officers that he could easily have studied. Yet the limitations of the thesis did not deter a bevy of ...”

“... themselves. This exhibition asks both, without labouring the point or falling away from self-awareness into self-regard. In the early part of the show, we move from images of forest savages, hybrids and wild women, up through prints of humans bubbling away in cooking pots (Grands Voyages de Théodore de ...”

“... attention from, the role of imperialism in Americans’ own state formation, foreign policy and self-image. At another, it has become an article of faith with many Americans that it was European imperialism which gave birth to the racial animosities and attitudes that so trouble their own society, and that only by a thorough and sceptical excavation of ...”

“... Between one dash and the next, as in the passage below, his passions move from an imagined self-assertion (as a cannibal, no less) to an imputed self-abasement (shame, deceit, cowardice). – and there was something unnatural and at first glance even enigmatic in the passionate and almost reverential way in which ...”

“... of some important painters, notably Degas and Monet, but his comments on art were either self-inflating pronouncements or insults (a Sargent portrait, he said, showed the ‘cleverness of an officer who cuts up oranges into fancy shapes after dinner’). He was ‘patchily informed about the Old Masters’, according to Sarah Walden, ‘and seems to ...”

“... nothing but their own myths of themselves, shambling golems moulded together out of fear, out of self-loathing and arrogance and delusion and lust. And animated by a stamp. His life is approaching a crisis. Various menaces are converging. Jared Sprain, a depressed customer, commits suicide before Mailman can deliver a comforting letter from a ...”

“... a life’s work of her ostracisation from the American mainstream and her own subsequent self-reinvention’. Wilson’s book provides a lot of material for what Freud called ‘wild analysis’. We learn, for example, that five months before Highsmith was born, her mother tried to abort her by drinking turpentine; she later told her daughter about ...”

“... foot and ankle are leaving the picture. ‘To the right of the canvas I read the small typed card: Self-Portrait by William Wechsler.’ Everybody who will matter in the story, apart from the children, is involved with the picture: Bill Wechsler paints it; Violet, Bill’s lover and model, is shown centre-stage in it; Lucille, his poet wife, exits the frame ...”

“... 2012, and even when they do, the scenery is pretty inconsequential. Surprisingly, Essex is rather self-effacing. Nikolaus Pevsner’s introduction to his Buildings of England volume for Essex made it clear that he considered the county tainted by association. Who, he wondered in 1954, would ever want to go ‘touring and sightseeing’ there, after ...”

“... In ‘Skin Deep’, first published in the New Statesman in 1966, she complains about ‘the agile self-appointed spreaders of enlightenment’ who suffer from ‘I-think-James-Baldwin-writes-marvellously syndrome’ and ignore other Black voices.Busby is especially attuned to the influence of editors and anthologists during the Harlem Renaissance. The ...”

“... graphical elements.’ Notwithstanding his graphical elements, Davis has indeed won the backing of self-described civil libertarians, including the usefully telegenic Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty, who threatened to sue Labour’s culture secretary over his suggestion that she shouldn’t be getting into bed (politically speaking) with a ...”