“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... unto themselves. At the same time, their expressive language is for the most part pretty self-evident. With the exception of the few black shapes that made their appearance at the start and the end of her painting life, Martin’s palette is airy and light – neither heavy nor dark – and it’s no stretch to associate this with the classicism she ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the work as a whole was ‘nearly the most worthless’ ever published. Croker also alleged self-serving embellishment, perhaps even fabrication. His charges were reinforced when the heirs of the famous bluestocking Mary Delany – a cherished mentor of Burney’s who had corresponded with Richardson and Swift – accused her of lying, and made caustic ...”

“... movement, which encouraged Hindus and Muslims to come together to burn foreign goods and demand self-rule. ‘Their thirst for conquest is endless,’ Siraj says at one point of ‘the foreigner’. In 1908, the myth of the Black Hole was emphatically put in its place by a student of Akshaykumar Maitreya, who wrote: We do not believe that there ever ...”

“... in 301 he sent in his stepson Magas as military governor; in 275 Magas rebelled, and ruled as the self-appointed king of Cyrenaica from 275 to 250. We well may wonder how such a démarche affected Callimachus. A citizen of Cyrene with a government-sponsored job in Ptolemaic Egypt clearly had to watch his step, and not solely on account of intermittent ...”

“... how safe Kim would be at home, her social network, her psychiatric history and history of self-harm. I was increasingly impressed with her friend, whom I began to feel sure I had met before. Of the 1500 or so patients registered with me, I know about a hundred by name. They are the ones I see often or whose illnesses have made a particular ...”

“... to deal with social problems; and their demands and ideas were also being highlighted in the newly self-confident press. The radically oppositional 19th-century ‘intelligentsia’ had not disappeared, but was gradually dissolving into a broader, more pragmatic and more diverse middle class. These are the developments which form the substance of Dowler’s ...”

“... of well-being isn’t so much a first principle as a tautology. He’s posited a single, final, self-evident desideratum and christened it ‘well-being’. No doubt he’s pleased to have avoided the survival trap of evolutionary psychology, but he has had to invent an empty category to do it. He can’t let the category stay empty for long. Neuroimaging ...”

“... when she libelled a whole village; and now the third, Aftermath, has brought Cusk charges of self-absorption, narcissism, condescension, commercialism, cruelty towards her children, too much revelation, not enough revelation, naivety, grandiloquence, ice in her heart and a lack of a sense of humour. Cusk has put the vitriol down to people not being able ...”

“... Pleasure implies dirtying your hands and mind, and being threatened; there is fear, disgust, self-loathing and moral failure. Pleasure was hard work; not everyone, perhaps not most people, could bear to find it.’ Jamal’s preferred position in relation to this fearful business is as an observer, in the background, watching. It’s as if he feels ...”