“... capped by Roger Cooter’s provocative study of phrenology as an intellectual instrument of self-help liberalism and social control (The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science, 1984). But hardly any attempt has been made to apply this sort of approach to Darwinism – to explain the value of a Malthusian Origin of Species in legitimating the authority of ...”

“... them to learn from the errors of the past. Fidel’s speeches became the only permitted source of self-criticism or policy revision, and he was a past master at covering up inconsistencies with rhetoric. However dazzling his argument, however deeply his listeners wished to help him build his utopia, the structures were never in place to enable him to do ...”

“... openly with several lovers before marrying Godwin – by having her heroine reject the erotic self-denial enforced on women in patriarchal society. Not only does she show Sibella, innocent child of the forest, freely ‘giving’ herself to the worldly Clement, she has her defend the union – which will result in pregnancy and her death in childbirth ...”

“... a different world: their lamps have very definitely been lit. Unlike her, they are ‘not at all self-conscious in their tailor-made clothes, not ashamed of their cropped hair’. At once envious of and terrified by their success, Joan has to acknowledge that she belongs to another age: her place in the evolution of feminism is that of the ‘pioneer’ who ...”

“... 16th century was an age of how to,’ Eamon tells us. Books of secrets, a mixture of self-help manuals and learned philosophical treatises, combined advice on how to harden steel with goat’s blood and how to tenderise beef with fig stalks, methods for seeing faraway objects by combining curved glasses and for preventing lightning strikes by ...”

“... his ‘just a’ body from dead. What if rather than crucifixion he’d opted for suffering lowly self-esteem for the remission of sins? What if, rather than ‘just a shell’, he’d raised his personality, say, or the Idea of Himself? Do you think they’d have changed the calendar for that? Done the Crusades? Burned witches? Easter was a body and blood ...”

“... clearly given to fits of lunacy (he himself describes paralysis and amnesia, and his paranoia is self-evident). Amongst the achievements of his last years was an erotic lesbian love poem (which ends with a lesbian marriage). This was written in Italian when passion restored him briefly to his senses (and to his knowledge of the language), and he hoped it ...”

“... of a Student’s Life, published in 1925. It is this book, with its fey charm and its self-regarding anecdotes, inevitably putting its author centre-stage (Harrison meets and impresses Gladstone; George Eliot admires Harrison’s wallpaper; Harrison reflects wistfully on love in old age), that has in large part fed the recent explosion of interest ...”

“... the evocation of impossibility. Much else besides, no doubt. At times Marías’s images take on a self-consciously Proustian flavour, the sense of a homage to the master of the exfoliating, multiple-choice analogy. Perhaps she was crying too because she felt the kind of envy or sense of exile that afflicts children when they are separated from their ...”

“... this is horribly complete. To measure the astonishing degree to which the ethos of Yugoslavia’s self-liberation could overcome hatred and revenge one needs perhaps to have seen the depths out of which it had to climb. That it did so Woodward, no kind of sentimentalist, is able to confirm. Why then this ferocious disintegration? Why its appalling speed and ...”

“... narratives as they reminisce. They engage a million man-hours of refugee-time in introspection and self-analysis, and consequently feel more depressed at the end of the day than they were at dawn. They are suicidal. A great many of them are religiously reflective, pondering on the curse that has paid them and their country a visitation. Only much later, in the ...”

“... is early slang for “homosexual”, and “man of all trades”, in a gay context, self-explanatory.’ (She does not cite the delightful, if apocryphal, story of the woman who had a crush on the handsome and multi-talented Bernstein and replied, on being told that he was gay: ‘Is there nothing that that man can’t do?’) She goes on to ...”

“... resigning in furious opposition to the very principle of popular consultation by referendum. This self-conscious wish to stand apart from the hoi polloi linked up with the sociology of meritocratic ascent. ‘Even when I disagreed with them,’ one SDP MP said to the authors, ‘I used to think of the people at Labour Party Conferences as my people. Then, a ...”

“... Security and Armed Forces and can govern by decree. To do so, however, the head of state must be a self-confident and energetic figure. Yeltsin is exhausted, has had two heart attacks of unknown severity and is prone to disabling depression. He is famously pneumatic, but his five years of office have seen a steady decline in his powers. Energy and ...”

“... of war; the lolloping punctuation; the careful suggestion of wide reading and the faint twinkle of self-conscious word-play. In 1930 Auden was a 23-year-old Oxford graduate, recently returned from a year in Berlin, who had finally had his first collection of poems accepted by Faber. He was a young man beginning to make his mark on the world; he was discovering ...”