“... But you’ve killed me!’ Barbara Comyns’s daughter, Caroline, recognised her younger self in Fanny, the little girl who dies of scarlet fever in Comyns’s second novel, Our Spoons Came from Woolworths. ‘Poor, beautiful little Fanny! her life had been wasted because of stupidity and poverty.’ On its first publication in 1950, when Caroline was fifteen, Comyns insisted on the insertion of a qualifying sentence at the beginning to the effect that ‘the only things that are true in this story are the wedding and Chapters Ten, Eleven and Twelve and the poverty ...”

“... of life … everybody seemed to fall in love with her’. She knew the effect she had and she was self-possessed and confident enough to exploit it. She posed nude with her pictures, was a dancer on the TV show Ready Steady Go!, and appeared in other films as well as Russell’s, including Alfie with Michael Caine. How much of her reputation came from her ...”

“... title, the salience of the line from the Declaration of Independence being that the truths are self-evident, not the holding of them – is a campaign book, written in collaboration with a pair of Washington speechwriters, Vinca LaFleur and Dylan Loewe (‘You made this process a joy,’ Harris tells them in the acknowledgments). It makes for dreary ...”

“... is possible. Pushing the boundaries requires a clear sense of what the boundaries are. Cultures of self-expression are sometimes also cultures of heightened social formality taken to the point at which mastery is its own kind of subversion. Was Oscar Wilde oppressed by the rules of high Victorian manners? No, because it was a scoring system he could master and ...”

“... Siffredi opposite Caroline Ducey, in only her fourth role. Siffredi is painfully vulnerable, his self-consciousness softening his He-Man looks and bearing. As the lover of Ducey’s Marie, a schoolteacher whose neurasthenic boyfriend no longer wants to sleep with her, Siffredi is a broken toyboy. His body seems cut and pasted into the film from another ...”

“... or that he lacked fraternal loyalty. It was more that, like Oscar, he could not resist a self-magnifying pose. Ever since Oscar’s arrest, he had been performing as the brother of the notorious criminal – all self-sacrifice and generously bestowed forgiveness. ‘Willie has been writing me the most monstrous ...”

“... an excuse for indulgence, but it would be hard to find anyone who thinks that this sort of self-justification is rational behaviour. Something similar applies to procrastination. You can always tell yourself that it doesn’t matter if you put off a piece of work until tomorrow, but do you really think that this is a rational way to carry on, given the ...”

“... of disinterested inquiry and the transmission of a cultural and intellectual inheritance are self-evident public goods; and so on. While that conception of a university and its purposes is still very much alive and may, I suspect, still be the one held by a great many ‘ordinary’ citizens, we may be nearing the point, at least in Britain, where it is ...”

“... was charged with manslaughter. Wang took the case on, entering a plea of not guilty on grounds of self-defence. The trial began early this year. When the judge rejected her request to authenticate footage the prosecutors claimed had been captured by surveillance cameras, she walked out of court and held up a placard outside the building, condemning the ...”

“... being moved. My own leg, in this moment, was no longer my own, and no longer part of my body or my self. No longer part of anything – unreal, absurd. (‘That which is not Body is no part of the Universe,’ writes Hobbes, ‘and since the Universe is All, it is Nothing and Nowhere.’) Suddenly, then, my leg (my ex-leg) was Nothing and Nowhere: it was ...”

“... 11 July 1982), writes: ‘Our case rests on the facts, on prescription and on the principle of self-determination.’ It is not clear what facts are meant. On prescription, the Sunday Times says that title from ‘continuous peaceful occupation’ became ‘an accepted principle in international law in the Thirties’. Professor Rosalyn Higgins argues from ...”

“... appearances, stigmatised by her fashion choices. Politics were made personal in her. Her greed for self-gratification, her half-educated dabbling in public affairs, were adduced as a reason the French were bankrupt and miserable. It was ridiculous, of course. She was one individual with limited power and influence, who focused the rays of misogyny. She was a ...”

“... nowadays I’m not sure that ‘the pictures’, like ‘the wireless’, aren’t among the self-consciously adopted emblems of fogeydom, the verbal equivalent of those smart Covent Garden establishments that do a line in old luggage. But calling the pictures ‘the movies’ went with calling cigarettes ‘fags’, beer ‘booze’ or girls ...”

“... handsome countenance which had dazzled so many courts was now permanently contorted with self-doubt and drink, and able to contemplate little more than flight (which before long he resorted to, deserting the stage of Italian politics for good). Machiavelli chose to extol him in Il Principe, nonetheless, because some facets of his career of conquest ...”

“... tristesse. The central character of the film, the petty criminal played by Belmondo, modelled his self-image on that of Humphrey Bogart in Mark Robson’s The Harder They Fall. These films were not even ‘classics’ – they were little-regarded films dating from the mid-Fifties, movies which Andrew Sarris, a leading historian of Hollywood, later ...”