“... only direct fatality – at the centre of a modern ritual, a work of spectacular and dramatic self-portraiture. Lisa Tickner quotes one witness saying: ‘I should think all criticism must be hushed in the face of such devotion.’ Davison’s death had caught the imagination. The public mood was changing to sympathy for her cause. The First World War ...”

“... piece with the many assured judgments they make about Hamlet in the play with the most canonically self-doubting hero. Everyone, it seems, is more certain than Hamlet about what’s wrong with him. Nietzsche, though, uses Hamlet, as people tend to do, to make a larger point. ‘The Dionysian man,’ he writes, resembles Hamlet; both have once looked truly ...”

“... and knew me,’ but there doesn’t seem to be much irony here, only considerable impatience and self-aggrandisement, such as comes from knowing you’re the hero of a novel. We also, by this stage of the work, have read quite a few pages of the notebook as it was being written (‘to me art has never seemed a subject or an aspect of form, but rather a ...”

“... into turmoil, as ‘bourgeois experts’ came under suspicion of treason and young outsiders, self-styled ‘proletarians’ with Party cards, assailed establishments in every field. The social sciences were no exception: the ‘modern’ professions of sociology, psychology, criminology, demography and statistics suffered tremendous setbacks: they lost ...”

“... in the middle of The End, the sixth and last volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s titanic work of self-description. At around page 482, the book swerves away from scenes of family and social life, and plunges, like a car crashing through a safety barrier, into a prolonged reflection on Adolf Hitler. For 360 pages Knausgaard discusses Hitler’s youthful ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... if you prefer that option, it’s easy to know what to vote: Conservative. Anything else would be self-defeating. But if you want the alternative, it’s harder to know what to do, because in some places, especially where the Lib Dems have the best chance of defeating the Tories, a Labour vote would be self-defeating. So we ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... main objection to Whitehall secrecy is not ethical but practical. Obsessional secrecy is self-defeating. If the British media are fixated on spookery – Douglas Hurd once observed that journalists would get excited by a blank sheet of paper if it was stamped ‘Secret’ – more openness would divert their energy towards hunting out the everyday ...”

“... executive and a model of stable governance. Crucially, it recognised the inevitability of Algerian self-determination. In these fundamental respects, the Fifth Republic did indeed appear to be a break with the past. But, as Chapman explains, Algeria also enabled the state to refine the art of population management. The Algerian migrant population in France ...”

“... the Berliner Tageblatt, a man admired even by Goebbels for his elegant prose, to Egon Erwin Kisch, self-styled ‘raging reporter’, who literally jumped ship in Melbourne after being refused entry to Australia because of his communist sympathies (he broke his leg after falling five metres). Kisch, like many others, received hostile treatment from the ...”

“... that two years after his election, many in France – and increasingly in Europe – consider his self-styled progressive identity to be at odds with his actual politics: a mix of neoliberalism and authoritarianism, projected by means of his own distinctive form of populism. Neoliberal attitudes are what one might expect of a man who had no background in ...”

“... it seems to me, is what the memoir is all about: the difficulty Sibylle has in breaking with a self defined by her father’s absence. Magisterial and unkind as Lacan could be, his name doesn’t weigh too heavily on her – it wasn’t until she was 21 that she was asked whether she was ‘the daughter of’. Her feelings of inadequacy, her dislike of ...”

“... exotic voyages to the Far East, pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and European journeys undertaken for self-betterment, anticipating the 18th-century Grand Tour. What Legassie calls ‘the prestige economy of long-distance knowledge’ made bestsellers of such works as Marco Polo’s Divisament dou monde, written with Rustichello da Pisa – a composer of ...”