“... to Nero, in which the emperor’s absolute power of life and death is supposed to encourage self-restraint. (One assumes Seneca eventually realised just how badly he had miscalculated.) In dramatic terms, the play sides with Nero’s view of the Augustan principate rather than Seneca’s: Nero’s description of the butchery carried out by Octavian and ...”

“... Uncle Sam teaching an infant Cuba how to ride a bike: a symbol of ‘freedom and liberty, self-possession and self-control’. The US military occupation of Cuba began on 1 January 1899, 60 years to the day before Che Guevara led a ragtag band of guerrillas into the streets of Havana. The decades in between saw an ...”

“... bright object, meaning to peck at it. And then he didn’t.’ Nawab’s failure to transcend his self-interest, in the moment of the other man’s death, coexists with his resilience, which allows him to survive, makes him what he is. ‘Six shots, six coins thrown down, six chances, and not one of them killed him, not Nawabdin Electrician.’ There’s no ...”

“... back at the hospital, I sat on the wards and held patients’ hands, chatting with whatever self they were that day. It seemed as good a use of my time as any. Our hospital had once been a workhouse and some patients still thought it was. It was an easy place in which to lose the will to live. About once a fortnight I would get away after lunch, and ...”

“... occasions when competent and ruthless kings rebuilt it (Edward III, then Henry V), infuriatingly self-indulgent kings lost it (Richard II, then Henry VI). The uselessness of the two latter monarchs had led to their murder by ambitious would-be replacements; nobility had been so unimpressed by the victims’ performance on the throne that they stood aside and ...”

“... as Feathers’s does. He administers the same law, but handles the insignia of their class more self-consciously, as if he can’t afford to be as casual as Feathers (whose gruff self-forged savoir faire is reminiscent sometimes of Tietjens’s in Ford’s Parade’s End). Veneering’s voice makes Feathers ...”

“... childhood, we see a world of enchanted, stationary time, where everything conspires to protect the self and the community against threats to calm and wellbeing. The very place is a trope aimed at the horrors of noisy Romanticism: ‘There is no sea, no tall mountains, cliffs or chasms, no slumberous forests – nothing grandiose, wild, and gloomy.’ ‘No ...”

“... Britain”’ prevails, the arc will have to go its own way, leaving the centre to its English self. Britannophiles insist this is a backward step, a return to the age of nationalism rather than an emergence from it. Of course it is. But it is one forced on the periphery by central failure: by the Brownite determination to conserve an archaic ...”

“... aged 57, in 1977. The Brazilian writer and her characters had always been close, and it seems that self and creation had finally merged in her mind. Others had already made the connection. After she left her husband in 1959, he poured out his regrets to her in a letter that addressed her as both of the women in her first novel – the untamed, amoral Joana and ...”

“... styles were adopted unknowingly by their producers and consumers. During the 1970s irony and self-consciousness began for the first time significantly to shape the behaviour of both groups. In 1971 … even Vogue asked if bad taste was a bad thing. The following year, magazine-of-the-moment Nova … coaxed readers to ‘let your bad taste out for an ...”

“... Therapy, they read like the occasional, mostly unrevised thoughts of a smart, self-conscious, possibly depressed young American; they can be tiring to read, but are sometimes quite funny. ‘i want to start a band’ expresses the will to power behind that desire: ‘i want my guitarist to be my jealous girlfriend/and i want my drummer to ...”

“... men in my time, yet I have never slain wantonly or stained my hand in innocent blood, but only in self-defence.’ The men’s aim is to find Curtis’s estranged brother, about which they are guardedly optimistic, and to discover King Solomon’s diamonds, about which – not knowing the title of the book – they are sceptical.The novel is peppered with ...”

“... Hilary Mantel put it less generously, but more succinctly: ‘Nurses and doctors are an elite, self-selected as sufficiently insensitive to get on with the job.’ The clinical language used to describe the loss of pulse when the heart fails is not subtle. There may be ‘rapid haemodynamic deterioration’: the blood stops moving around the ...”

“... Joan Rivers (drawn in ink while talking to the gay writer Armistead Maupin, and therefore not self-consciously posing), Rita Hayworth, Natalie Wood, Marlene Dietrich (drawn while posing, clearly), Simon Callow, John Gielgud and Ian McKellen. (My husband, David, incidentally, is related to Dietrich – on his mother’s side.) The screenwriters don’t ...”

“... lack of interest in this sort of thing is that it descends down to printers and publishers: it is self-fulfilling. But did Rastell’s biography and subject matter entangle with a sense of an emerging vernacular vitality? The Stationers’ Company is an expression of a quantity of archival labour and expertise that may never be surpassed: it is a great piling ...”