“... portraits and monuments, Queen Victoria’s Secrets offers not so much an account of the Queen’s self-fashioning as an entertaining compendium of the conflicting guises in which the 19th century chose to see her. Victoria emerges here in all the infinite variety of a 19th-century Cleopatra – not just as Albert’s radiant bride or the reclusive widow of ...”

“... turned down films that didn’t include Tracy because she was afraid of his ‘capacity for self-destruction’ when left on his own. Leaming’s research is extensive and thorough, and all sources are acknowledged. She gives precise dates for all of Hepburn’s movements, and although we know where she was every day of every year, this means that our ...”

“... sticky note stuck? No felt-tip scrawl saying ‘Debt to Murdoch is crippling,’ or ‘X is to Self as Self is to Amis’ or ‘vivid, charming, but lacking in force’? What, page 100 reached, and nothing done? Nothing to say, except ‘I am really enjoying myself’? Anyone who reads, let’s say, Joanna Trollope will ...”

“... passages are going to strike people as lurid, because she allows herself some moments of overt self-justification in which she makes sarcastic calls for a literature of ‘modesty and social decorum ... a literature that is unassertive, limpid, economical and lean’ (all of which The Last Magician is most certainly not). Such tactics are still considered ...”

“... problems, Beyond the Limits offers us a vision of Armageddon and a generalised injunction to self-denial. In the aftermath of the Rio Summit it is as well to be reminded just whom this self-denial will hurt. Rio was only partly about the environment; it was also about the fears of the wrold’s poor countries that the ...”

“... themselves, helping each other with the earnest discussion of books and philosophy that marks the self-taught: rather like Leonard Bast. They were pretty and lively and – once they had recovered from Bert – they got married, mostly to teachers, or returned to existing marriages and settled down with apparent content into a station of life only modestly ...”

“... in the Fifties. But today, more than 65 years after it was created, the humour seems trite and self-consciously cute, although this may be due to the current preference for technique over subtlety. Les Masques(1933) was the first ballet to incorporate what became known as the ‘Fred Step’ (a combination of five steps which he credited to Pavlova). It ...”

“... actual existence) and our long ordeal begin once more’. Steward visited Greenwich Village, the self-appointed centre of American gay life in the 1930s, but he felt little need to move there, the much mythologised rite recorded in most queer autobiographies then and now. Given Steward’s three hundred sexual encounters in Ohio, one wonders whether these ...”

“... Brumaire,make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising ...”

“... it had taken place or whether it was caused by a virus or by bacteria. My ignorance was largely self-inflicted: from an early age I sensed that dwelling on what had happened to me, picking at the emotional scar tissue, wasn’t going to do me much good. Only in the late 1990s, when I was in Iraq talking to doctors and patients in ill-equipped hospitals hit ...”

“... there is no hint of hagiography in Everill’s assessment of the abolitionists’ economics. Their self-interest is especially evident in her analysis of British debates about sugar duties. Under the system known as imperial preference, sugars grown in the slaveholding West Indies had low tariffs on entry to Britain, and were rewarded with bounties when resold ...”

“... in science fiction known as the New Wave. In 2002, Harrison summed up the New Wave’s aims in a self-deprecating reassessment of his novel The Centauri Device (1974), which succeeded, in his view, insofar as it ‘took the piss out of SF’s three main tenets: (1) the reader-identification character always drives the action; (2) the universe is ...”

“... David that we don’t have the knowledge to make. We could suppose him to be an untrustworthy, self-obsessed, prissy bore; we could suppose him to be transfigured by a libidinous fantasy of self-abandonment into a more serene, less materialistic person. What Ridgway shows could lead us to either conclusion, or to ...”

“... that social ideals of body size and shape have generally been at some remove from the norm. One self-enforcing advantage of power and status has always been the ability to command a flattering reflection. If anyone thought that at 54 inches around the waist, Henry VIII was fat, they thought twice about saying so and in Holbein’s portraits of the king his ...”

“... social composition, and gave it a more conventionally elite character. Ambitious, prodigious self-made men such as Johnson, Reynolds, Burke and Goldsmith were joined by establishment figures such as Lord Ossory (made a member in 1777) and Viscount Althorp (made a member in 1778), the first peers to be elected. By the time of Johnson’s death, there were ...”