“... 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 ...”

“... general worry about identity politics: ‘If what matters about me is my individual and authentic self, why is so much contemporary talk of identity about large categories – race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality – that seem so far from the individual?’ But much of it is specific to race consciousness, for race in Appiah’s view is such a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and no training in its methods and ideas. Ethnopsychiatry was, as McCulloch says, ‘very much a self-enclosed enterprise’. The effects of the professional isolation of ethnopsychiatry, within medicine and from anthropology, were exacerbated by the fact that the most extensive facilities were in the settler colonies, and the ethnopsychiatrists were members ...”

“... to quote such large chunks of text, and to allow in, for example, whole passages of elaborate (and self-deceiving) moral analysis: Sadists of Mlle Vinteuil’s sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so naturally virtuous, that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, the prerogative of the wicked. And when they allow themselves for a moment ...”

“... was soon to be both heavy and clumsy. The Mirror was saved financially but sadly disfigured by his self-promotion and promises of vast wealth for the readers: assuredly, he lacked the newspaper sense of a Beaverbrook. At least he was against any proliferation of nipples. The new broom had his principles and had given evidence against the publishers of Last ...”

“... 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 ...”