“... who fancies himself ‘the last of the Bohemians’ and survives, he likes to say, on ‘air, self-esteem, cigarette butts, cowboy coffee, fried-egg sandwiches and ketchup’. He claims that he understands the cawing of seagulls so well that he can translate poetry into it, and notes that the poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow are particularly suited to ...”

“... folkways he so lately debunked, turning native on his own patch. Latter-day examples include the self-styled ‘Post-Modern bourgeois liberal’ Richard Rorty. The politics of this turn tend to the folksy – in an arch, snowstorm-paperweight-collecting kind of way – if not downright völkisch. And, as Clifford Geertz has noted, the wogs start long before ...”

“... were not overthrown because they were demonised (assassinations were more often the result of self-serving rivalries within the palace than of political principle or moral outrage), they were demonised because they were overthrown. If one of the many attempts on Hadrian’s life had been successful, he, too, would most probably have been written into ...”

“... more remote than Stafford’s Boston. I’m stalled on the threshold of Boston Adventure by the self-consciousness of the highly wrought prose. By contrast, the first half of Stafford’s second novel, The Mountain Lion, is breathtakingly original and flies free of what feels mannered and dated elsewhere in her work. Some of her short stories are also very ...”

“... character I know around this town’.) His treatment of his early partners shows how deeply this self- involvement bled into his private affairs. He was married first in 1964 to Larrine Sullivan, a college flame. Packer praises him for refusing the pleasures of the ‘vast brothel’ of South Vietnam as a result of his loyalty to her. He also tells us ...”

“... expression of a homogenous viewpoint, or even, in a figurative sense, the viewpoint of a corporate self. It is this type of personhood, taken further, that is conveyed by the term ‘democratic’ Athens. The rule of the demos, carried out through short-term representatives and offices, combined the sense of corporate selfhood with that of large-scale ...”

“... saw how the pope’s death unravelled the once fearsome duke, who was ‘carried away by that bold self-confidence of his’, ranting and raving with ‘words full of poison and anger’. His state was lost. Machiavelli reflected in The Prince that Cesare had ‘acquired his state with the Fortuna of his father and lost it with the same, though he had taken ...”

“... to which immigrants were entitled.In 2002, the BNP’s first candidates included a pub landlord, a self-employed civil engineer and a woman who worked in a car-parts factory (‘people like you’). In 2019, the Ukip biographer turned right-populist advocate Matthew Goodwin identified the Brexit Party’s core vote in the European elections as the ...”

“... was transformed into a thriving metropolis by the discovery of the Glenn Pool oilfield nearby. The self-proclaimed Oil Capital of the World, where J. Paul Getty began the career that made him the world’s richest man, had seen its population grow 300 per cent over the previous decade, from 18,000 to 72,000 people. Around 10,000 residents were African ...”

“... her own life, just as she vowed to be better than her mother, an artist whose main talent was for self-regard. Ursula, however, found being a good parent harder than being a good communist, and when she had to choose between the two, she invariably chose communism. Turbulence in the Weimar Republic, including the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg, pushed ...”

“... would come out fighting, so Stockman interrupted, harried and bullied Reagan. It destroyed his self-confidence: ‘What have you done to my husband?’ Nancy Reagan demanded. Worse, they had prepped Reagan for the wrong opponent. Aware of Reagan’s popularity, Mondale’s team came up with what they called the ‘gold watch strategy’; rather than attack ...”

“... an equivalent response. Maybe most of us also underestimate the value saga-society put on self-control. There are several scenes in the saga where characters say nothing but betray their feelings by their nervous reactions. Taunted by his mother, Bergthora, into taking blood-revenge, Skarphedin says, pretending to make a joke of it: ‘Our old mother ...”

“... the ideal training for becoming an Edwardian freedom fighter. She had only to turn her profound self-abnegation to a different end. The hunger strikes started in June 1909 with Marion Wallace Dunlop, an artist, throwing fried fish, bananas and hot milk out of the window of her cell. Asked what she would have for dinner, she replied: ‘My ...”

“... about the alarming conjunction of consumerism, image-transmitting technology and the death-driven self, and the way it plays out in terrorist ‘spectaculars’ and private anomie – has turned into a roar, and his response has seemed to be governed by contradictory impulses. One is to embrace the role of a prophet, as he does in Cosmopolis (2003), a fiery ...”

“... a gentle landscape of lawns and sparkling streams, and yet its freedom is ‘fictitious’. ‘Self-dependent lordlings’ have been able to engross power and make laws that suit their own interests at the expense of the country as a whole, and have at the same time convinced the meanest peasant that he too is free: Pride in their port, defiance in their ...”