“... 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 ...”

“... new order of things, when it has become apparent that ‘literature is best understood not as a self-contained entity but rather as a writing practice, a particular formation within the world of discourse.’ Literature, that is, loses its ‘privileged’ status, and in so far as it exists at all does so not ‘autonomously’ but as part of a pattern of ...”

“... their historical significance, or even seeing them as historically inevitable, takes over from the self-righteous rhetoric of commending or condemning them. Or, indeed, of assessing their truth, a word which Jameson has now ominously begun to put in scare quotes. The case is embarrassingly close to the old liberal nostrum that to understand all is to forgive ...”

“... from memory? This singular approach makes Bonnard’s later work both childlike and, given his self-imposed constraints, highly accomplished, lending it in the best instances a charm and inquisitiveness that is not entirely well served by the Tate Modern show, the first major British exhibition of his work in twenty years. The last occasion, in 1998, took ...”

“... his presidency barely a month after the event, isn’t his private, inner voice; it’s a public, self-justifying voice, which is perhaps all we can expect from a novel written by a former US president and his collaborators, but anyone hoping for a flash of insight, however brief, into what it’s like to be both an ordinary, fallible human being and the most ...”

“... two-hour battle with the ‘slave breaker’ Edward Covey as the most significant example of his self-mythologising. On Covey’s dilapidated farmstead, Blight writes, ‘Ishmael found his Ahab, the ultimate tyrant whose obsessions could never be tamed.’ But in trying to break the slave, Covey himself was broken. ‘I felt as I never felt ...”

“... at front lines and behind them. Such behaviour, which tarnished both the public image and the self-image of the strong and noble soldier, has not been included in personal or official histories of war.It’s also difficult to find many women. There are wonderful, rich accounts of women’s auxiliary forces, of pilots and riveters, of women’s land ...”

“... Eastman’s papers he discovered a stranger writer than he had imagined: moody, wordy, full of self-doubt, so involved with Jeanne Moreau that you wonder what happened between them. She had one other big credit, The Fortune (1975), which has passed into history as a failure, buried beneath the weight of Mike Nichols, Jack Nicholson and Warren Beatty, such ...”

“... artistic canons merely disguised the simple fact that they weren’t very important to anyone’s self-fashioning. By the late 1990s the humanities appeared marginal even to the universities, driven as they were by Federal grants and corporate connections to the sciences. Moreover, in the wake of the ‘new economy’, pundits began to wonder what the ...”

“... consequence to be a reductio, but I can’t think why. It is entirely plausible, indeed entirely self-evident, that there is a very great deal about how the mind works that we do not understand. Here and elsewhere, Dennett writes as though science is over and we know already what’s in it and what’s not. (‘Can’t we dismiss the whole sorry lot’ of ...”

“... the few things they had in common were obstinacy, irresponsibility and an almost total lack of self-control. From the moment they met until what Walter Scott called the ‘brutal insanity’ of the queen’s trial for adultery in 1820, the relationship was a catastrophe acted out in public with little regard for decency, let alone dignity. Ever since, this ...”

“... at first sight. The autopsy revealed 23 wounds on Visconti’s body. Was this really a case of self-defence? Was Sanpelayo perhaps ridding himself of an irksome rival by employing the services of a tough war veteran? Kesslitz, after all, needed the money, and his financial affairs were entirely in the hands of the Spaniard. Moreover, Kesslitz, it turned ...”

“... the third category, although I understand it very soberly, without a shadow of sentimentality or self-pity . . . To be homeless . . . means only that the person having this defect cannot indicate the streets, cities or community that might be his home, his, as one is wont to say, miniature homeland. It is this ...”