“... Edmund Spenser’s request to be buried near him in 1599.The abbey’s most jaw-dropping piece of self-aggrandisement – it’s a pretty high bar – is the tomb of George Villiers. Villiers was the favourite of both James I, who said he was ‘as beautiful as a hunting leopard’ and made him duke of Buckingham, and Charles I, who had him buried next to the ...”

“... books, Slotkin in A Great Disorder sees national myths as contested, evolving and sometimes self-contradictory. Thus the nationwide dissemination of the Lost Cause in the late 19th and early 20th centuries left space for the emergence of a more egalitarian vision. This, however, didn’t take hold until during and after the Second World War. Before ...”

“... family life could mesh with a fear that creation itself was in such jeopardy that any attempt at self-expression – whether in art, politics or religion – was irrelevant and even fatuous. You could imagine this dilemma inspiring a perverse comedy (think of Billy Wilder or Paul Thomas Anderson running it, let alone Preston Sturges) in which a respected ...”

“... Goldin reveres Visconti, Antonioni, Cassavetes, Jack Smith. Her images – I’m thinking of a self-portrait at a window, in which she has a curl at the nape of her neck and scratches on her exposed back – form part of an autobiographical narrative, one that reveals in order to keep battling against denial and revisionism. They push back against the ...”

“... to Strozzi, which are full of assurances that the plan is proceeding swimmingly, interspersed with self-serving excuses for why the painting is not yet in his possession. At one point he claims to have leaped from the roof of the Palazzo della Signoria, landing unhurt in a conveniently parked hay cart below, as if he were Errol Flynn or Buster Keaton. Never ...”

“... at home there, or learned more than a few words of Welsh. But he seized on ‘being Welsh’ as a self-masking identity, intended to make him different, even mysterious, to his contemporaries. This strategy didn’t always convince. He certainly seemed English enough to his friends as he grew up and calmed down, emerging as a ...”

“... a Jew, from a prominent New York Jewish family. People argued about whether his gift was an act of self-hatred or a wise guy’s last laugh. Judging from the reaction at the time, it didn’t occur to anyone that it was a matter of principle. And that included me. Sparks’s will, filed in New York County Surrogate’s Court, became a cause célèbre. The ...”

“... proposes to address, and often a cover for more pernicious motives. Celebrities are particularly self-serving in this regard. In his essay ‘The Birth of White Saviour Imagery’, Wainaina’s ‘how to’ becomes a caustic ‘how not to’: ‘You should avoid picking up random children you do not know for a photo that you then publish online … no matter ...”

“... of vision’. They remind us we’re watching a ‘mediated form of seeing’.The self-referentiality of A Matter of Life and Death anticipates The Red Shoes, with its reflection on the process (and the psychological cost) of making art and cinema. Like its predecessor, the film has two contrasting modes of representation. A fantasy ballet ...”

“... welcome the Holy Alliance as ‘the most liberal of all ideas’? Two aspects of Alexander’s self-presentation in the years leading up to the treaty secured its credibility as an instrument of progressive reform. The first was his successful mobilisation of one of the most enduring political scripts of the Enlightenment: the virtuous monarch as ‘friend ...”

“... Santagata argues that Boccaccio suffered from ‘psychological fragility’ that often led to self-sabotage. Emotionally unstable and intellectually restless, he experienced frequent mood swings that sapped his confidence. Late in life he was certain he had been a failure, especially when he compared his output with Dante’s or Petrarch’s. Yet the same ...”

“... speaker writes home to his mother about his brother’s arrest. Poetry satisfied the ‘need for self-expression at a formative period of my life’. But politics came with it: Johnson joined the British Black Panther Party while still at school, and was introduced to Black consciousness literature for the first time: W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black ...”

“... of socialist realism. Then came news of the Stalin trials and purges. Exercising a great deal of self-deception, some Surrealists, including Aragon, remained party members. Most of the others left; the proud Breton was further alienated when he was refused a speaking slot at the International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture in 1935. A chief ...”

“... evade not only the public horrors they seem faintly to shadow, but more private intensities of self-contemplation: they work, in short, as ritual games and puzzles, effective by their exclusions – their interesting mix of violence and nullity the opium, perhaps, of the English rectory and manor-house during the troubled inter-war period. With an ...”

“... held for the murder of an American officer; the investigation takes him to Vienna and leads to a self-help organisation of former, much-wanted Nazis. All of which is perfectly sound, if expectable, and resourcefully peopled with actual as well as imaginary villains. Kerr is much more at home among the ruins than he was in the Reich. Where he still leaves me ...”