“... found in these essentially generic representations but in the more nuanced and largely involuntary self-portraiture of the handwritten page. ‘It befits a merchant always to have ink-stained hands,’ Leon Battista Alberti wrote in the 1430s, and few exemplified this better than Datini. A born micro-manager, he wrote almost all of his business letters with ...”

“... the playwright’s use of metatheatrical tropes by examining the place of the stage and of self-conscious performance in the early modern imaginary across an extraordinary variety of texts, from the classical past through medieval and early Tudor drama, to the repertoire of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The exemplary alertness to the theatrical ...”

“... fire, the writer Daniela Cascella has suggested the neat coinage ‘trancelation’, the state of self-dissolution some translators reach. Briggs very much identifies with Lowe-Porter’s admission that she was a ‘would-be writer who refuses to let go of her translations until she feels she has written the books herself’. In Sympathy for the Traitor, his ...”

“... to Mozart. He disapproved of boxing, guns and Wagner. Endowed with porch-front charm, he was self-conscious about his ‘girl’s mouth’ and his ‘inordinate desire to look nice’ when posing for photographs. His success as a mounted officer in the US army in France during the First World War was his only experience of the wider world and became a ...”

“... to take the family’s religion seriously, since it has already been shown to be destructive and self-defeating.In theory Jas’s two grannies represent different intensities of commitment – there’s a more religious and a less religious side to the family – but no such nuance is detectable in the text, unless it’s the presence of a coil stuck in ...”

“... The ‘unconstitution’ has worked only because England’s ruling elites, out of decent self-interest, have never fully exploited its incredible lack of formal constraint on executive power. That convention is now ending, and the executive is pushing hard at its boundaries. What’s needed is not yet a constitution, but its preliminary, the ...”

“... federation drew on East London’s long-standing radical and sexually egalitarian networks and was self-consciously progressive. In sharp contrast to the WSPU, the ELFS permitted male members, supported local trade union campaigns, and – when militant tactics like window-breaking landed Pankhurst and others in jail – built up a ‘People’s Army’ to ...”

“... inside sanatoriums varied and Iris left school to care for her mother. Being a daughter was about self-sacrifice (Iris tried to jump into Beatrice’s grave when she was buried near Rose in Bristol), a belief Iris tried to impress on her daughter Hazel, who was born in Devon in 1948. But Carby was unruly. She resisted assimilation into the maternal family ...”

“... of the civil rights movement, as well as to fundamentalist Christians and inheritors of the self-reliant Jefferson-Jackson tradition. His rhetoric warned of the evils of big government: he rallied businesses and banks against regulation, family-minded moralists against permissive laws, and the vestiges of the America First lobby against expensive ...”

“... novels, among them a belief in the primacy of the conduct of the individual and the quest for self-knowledge over any group allegiance, a belief in elitism and a suspicion of democracy and equality. In The Mask of Apollo (1966), Axiothea, a girl who disguises herself as a boy to attend Plato’s academy, says: ‘Equality! I hope I need never sink so ...”

“... the action to a single day is a mild piece of formalism, certainly when compared with some self-imposed contortions, but it disrupts standard novelistic workings just the same. Plot can more or less evaporate, replaced by less strident patterns of significance. What happens in Ulysses? Even if you accept Hugh Kenner’s explanation for the unfamiliar ...”

“... seem traditional if Clark weren’t such an active protagonist in his own argument. In part this self-staging comes with a phenomenological perspective (Clark counts Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s great essay ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’ as one inspiration), and it is accentuated by psychoanalysis as well. This isn’t new to Clark – his social art history often ...”

“... have been the subject, if not the pretext, for a Stoppard play. Burnett is neither coy nor unduly self-reflexive about the task of editing the most exacting of editors. He takes the pressure, and he takes the pressure off, by being at once thorough and painstaking with the required information, and by occasionally aping Housman’s gleeful knockdown ...”

“... for so long one of the consuming preoccupations of both professional historiography and national self-definition. What’s more, his research has been assiduous not just in the sources (many of them unpublished) bearing directly on Hill’s life, but also in the relevant scholarship about 20th-century Britain, higher education, and the long agonies of the ...”

“... own observation of the Hopi, correlated to different phases in humanity’s search for meaning and self-knowledge, developing from religion (the least free), via the intermediate realm of art (where their truth remained ‘obscure’), to the summit of free inquiry, or science. Unfortunately, the diagrams Warburg produced to illustrate his theories are ...”