“... preferment, he seems to have known from his thirties on that he was likely to become Pope, and as self-confidence grew into certainty, he developed a feline narcissism, a self-conscious and often exhibitionist piety. As a precocious Papal nuncio in Germany, he had the bad luck to run headlong into the terror of the 1919 ...”

“... to two hours. ‘Perhaps nothing the man has done reveals quite so much of his egotism and his self-assurance,’ Arthur Deering wrote in Sir Samuel Ferguson, Poet and Antiquarian (1931). Perhaps nothing Muldoon has done reveals quite so much of his egotism and his self-assurance as his attempt to present in A-Z form the ...”

“... hundreds of crabs scurry across the idyllic beach at Krabi in Thailand. They form a fractious, self-governing community which in many respects mirrors our own. They fight over territory, squabble over food and get along, with just enough co-operation to survive. What distinguishes humans from crabs, apart from the lack of claws, is the degree of ...”

“... Many are written but few survive. They are too often catalogues of games lost and won, or merely self-congratulatory. And they only rarely connect to the wider world. Addicted, however, emphatically connects to the wider world. For this book, as is now well known, is about two addictions: football and drink – and both are treated with remarkable ...”

“... their enormous services to the subject, all these scholars positively crowed with nationalistic self-satisfaction.’ Moreover, the multicultural Davies crows, none of them gained a reputation outside the English-speaking world. They were mired in a mental framework that simply could not conceive of a world which did not place the greatest ...”

“... held it to be the prime cause of death, yet Evans-Pritchard could find no evidence of any ‘self-conscious’ witches among them. The question ‘Were there people who believed themselves to be witches?’ has thus long been excluded from consideration. But it seems that this self-denying ordinance is becoming ...”

“... Action – the Dust Bowl troubadour Woody Guthrie, the cabaret bluesman Josh White and the self-invented folk bard Pete Seeger. The Oklahoma-born Guthrie, the most enduring of the three, was the culmination of those country protest singers – the Jim Garlands and Aunt Molly Jacksons – recruited into the Popular Front during the union struggles of ...”

“... court artists display, to change one word in Erving Goffman’s classic title, the presentation of self in celebrity life. When they pretend to uncover the authentic private person hidden beneath the public performance, they are just engaging in another form of play. Some Emily Post fans were appalled at Covarrubias’s depiction of the mistress of etiquette ...”

“... close friend of Johnson and his circle. The seasonal character of his life – the depression and self-doubt which settled on him when he returned to Edinburgh and ‘duty’, the joyous sense of liberation when he set off on his annual journeys to the south – was now set. This volume begins with Boswell taking pious resolutions: he was happy in his new ...”

“... that we have climbed, not into an imitation of some aspect of the turn-of-the-century, but into a self-mocking myth which at first, unlike Fevvers, has a little trouble getting off the ground. Things are clearer once we have been given Fevvers’ past life, and the novel moves from London to St Petersburg and Siberia. Fevvers has signed up with a circus run ...”

“... acts of persons. A related criticism concerns the old Durkheim’s image of the social world as a self-propelled system with causes ‘that are deterministic’ – a phrase the new translation omits completely. And some of the ten essays added at the back of this edition reveal that, at least in the later years of his life, Durkheim was somewhat ...”

“... white employers, and eventually they began to organise in secret societies, or izigebengus, in self-defence. The services performed by prostitutes and liquor-vendors were, of course, of a quite different order. Initially both prostitution and liquor were promoted in the interests of the employers rather than the workers: like the liquor-vendors, the ...”

“... is in our activities, the more effectively we can serve society. This last proposition is not self-evidently valid and is rejected by a great many of our paymasters. Populist anti-intellectualism extends to fear and resentment of research. That penicillin or pocket calculators or meteorological satellites would not exist unless someone had done the basic ...”

“... what he defined as the homosexual community: the limp-wristed, lisping men who are sometimes the self-appointed representatives of homosexual love in our culture.’ Even when he accepted his impulses and initiated affairs with young men, Cheever continued to hide behind an image of himself as ‘a patrician, old-fashioned country gentleman’. These ...”

“... she grows more endearing to the reader, who also gives her credit for being more reflective and self-critical than Fred, a more fully-engaged researcher and a more committed lover. Vinnie’s affair and its dénouement would not move us as it does if the love affair of the more presentable couple had not been developed first. Not that the Fred plot is ...”