“... of ‘Marlowe and the Will to Absolute Play’, the fifth chapter of Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980), remain the best modern starting point for an understanding of Marlowe’s canon and its place in the world that produced it. Shrewdly detailed, sharing in the wit of Marlowe’s onstage cruelties even while it demonstrates the way they ...”

“... himself was coy about its meaning. Towards the end of his life, in 1981, he referred to it as a ‘self-portrait’. ‘You only have to look at it, it’s me,’ he said. But the painting also seems intended to parody the Western fetishisation of colonised people’s bodies and cultures. In 1950, the Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz described the buttocks ...”

“... those referred to as her ‘charges’, more than three hundred of them. Her new assignment, the self-made plutocrat K.J. Boone, is a tough nut to crack, unable to prevent her from entering ‘the orb of his thoughts’ but refusing to give her much head space. He holds fast to his idea of himself as a pioneer and a hero. The words ‘ghost’ and ...”

“... Woodforde is modest, affectionate, and wholly without snobbery, and while some may say that in a self-portrait he is bound to be so, it has to be remembered that in a diary stretching across nearly fifty years a great many unflattering lines will usually have crept in to balance any attempt by the writer to present his good side only. And then there are ...”

“... by his father, Peter, who has impressed himself on the public mind, rightly or wrongly, as a self-made authoritarian gifted with inflexible will, prescient ambition and a strikingly neo-Victorian belief in ‘scientific’ progress. It comes as no surprise to learn from the new book on Coe, Running Free, that ‘Peter’ is a name assumed by Coe Sr to ...”

“... Bogie pours whisky in a steady stream. Small vices. It’s by virtue they are gripped. Of self-indulgence there is not a gleam. She wavers but he has the strength of ten As time goes by and Sam plays it again. Reagan and Thatcher ought to be like that. Instead they have a frightful falling-out. The Russian pipeline has inspired the spat, Or that’s ...”

“... pace, such productions struck the wrong note. The patriotic epic, except in the debased and self-destructive form of the Bond films, was an offence to the spirit of the age. The old military-imperial spectaculars were acceptable only when infused with anti-war feeling and social satire, as in Tony Richardson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade. In ...”

“... itself from outside influences, the more responsive it is likely to be to internal traditions and self-imposed boundaries of thinking. In a sense, insulation permits objectivity – and we assume our undergraduate is relieved at last to hear that some degree of objectivity is possible. Poking behind the historian has been fashionable in the 20th ...”

“... his looks, from the women’s advances and revulsions. He covers himself with bandages – not in self-disgust, like Mr Samsa in Kafka’s tale, ashamed that he has become a beetle – but rather as a useful, interesting disguise. He climbs buildings as if he were flying, his bandages unfurl and roll down to earth, caught by an admiring boy who returns them ...”

“... lodge, called Propaganda 2, and as Italian Freemasonry fell into disrepute, so the ripples of self-questioning spread outwards, to other Masonic brotherhoods. In France, there is now open discussion about Masonry’s close ties to the Socialists and speculation as to the part influential Masons played in the 1981 Elections. (The current French Grand ...”

“... by the late medieval Popes, more than half was unconverted before AD 1000. Even the peoples most self-consciously Christian by that date, like the Franks and Anglo-Saxons, had not been Christian when they migrated from Germany, or for several generations afterwards. The Christianisation of rural Francia, for instance, probably ended around 750: that is, two ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the place in spite of its constraints. But perhaps the biggest problem remains the writer’s self that can never quite be abolished. Bail’s early London diaries, published as Longhand: A Writer’s Notebook (1989), are a pointillist collection of beautiful, often self-regarding sentences, his own and ...”

“... make up All around Atlantis has an ‘I’, and this may signal a further shift in Eisenberg’s self-denying aesthetic, her predilection for the other view that leaves more room for the voice of the text. In her two earlier collections, Transactions in a Foreign Currency, 12 years ago and Under the 82nd Airborne in 1992, narrators were in any case regularly ...”

“... on whom he experimented for meagre payments). In fact, the myth of Hunter’s self-inoculation was scotched by George Quist in a 1979 paper. The story, designed to fit the image of the inhuman experimentalist, was fabricated by a pupil of Hunter’s, Jesse Foot, who had become a disgruntled rival. One of Hunter’s biographers wants to ...”