“... of exposition to make it available to a broad public. This is history meant to matter to the self-comprehension and self-definition of a people, but its central argument is questionable to an even greater extent than its author’s dexterity in anticipating criticism allows. The title is, of course, a sidelong ...”

“... rebellion against Julius Caesar in the late 50s BC. Vercingetorix is written up in Caesar’s own self-serving account of the Gallic War as a traitor and Gallic nationalist, who was resoundingly outmanoeuvred by Roman tactics at the Battle of Alesia; he surrendered to Caesar and was packed off to Rome, to be killed several years later as part of the ...”

“... almost universally believed that Cicero had died an exemplary death. Whatever accusations of self-interest, vacillation or cowardice they might level at other aspects of his life, everyone reckoned that on this occasion he behaved splendidly: sticking his bare neck out of the litter, he calmly demanded (as heroes have continued to do ever since) that the ...”

“... and ubiquity in the United States of a legal education, in other contexts the mark of cabalistic self interest, becomes a badge of political freedom. The third is a culture of consent. No state can endure unless its people accepts that their representatives speak for them, rather than simply at them. The dilemma of modern democracy, as Siedentop (following ...”

“... in his treatment of Shaw’s sexuality and the influence of Shaw’s lovers, friends, family and self on his work. Shaw claimed that his active sex life began at the age of 29 and ended 14 years later; for Holroyd, the chaos of Shaw’s early affairs, the celibacy of his marriage and the wild romantic agonies of his later attachments (usually to ...”

“... horticultural phase taste like pumpkins, the liqueur they distil in the cellar explodes, their self-medication makes them ill, and so on. And when, later, they move up from more or less scientific experiments to start dabbling in the humanities, developing tastes and ambitions in literature, education, even politics, we can be sure in advance that every ...”

“... pipeline that would run from Iran, through Shia-dominated Iraq, to Syria; in November 2005 a self-defence pact was signed which allows Iran to store weapons, sensitive equipment and hazardous material on Syrian soil; Iran’s ambassador in Beirut promised to counter an Israeli attack on Syria with ‘full power’. The links are theological, too. When I ...”

“... a victory. This was not just one more Soviet town, a Kharkov or an Orel. But once again we see the self-defeating nature of the Nazi approach to war. At the outset the German army had cost itself the sympathies of millions of Ukrainians by treating them as subhuman; it now fell victim to a huge pincer movement extending west of Stalingrad because of its ...”

“... No wonder corporate and political leaders hire this stylish practice: there is a mirroring of self-images here, at once technocratic and innovative, that suits client and firm alike. ‘Foster’ offers an architecture of great panache, with sleek surfaces, usually of metal and glass, luminous spaces, often open in plan, and suave profiles that can also ...”

“... a momentous revelation. How did people live? I remembered old peasant stories of magic treasure: self-replenishing cooking pots found under rocks in fields, donkeys shitting gold. I felt I understood these tales for the first time: the desperation under the antic humour. The strange thing, though, was that later I felt only satisfaction with the way I had ...”

“... before him, portrays himself as a representative of these places and their cosmology, an act of self-invention as bold as that of any renamed outlaw. Reagan went from the Midwest to Hollywood; Bush is a product of East Coast privilege, even if he did go to flat, dry Midlands, Texas, to cultivate his insularity and a failed oil business. For more than a ...”

“... a story and doing good, she would try to do good. It was a strange, provoking, deliberately self-contradictory tale, which instantly sparked heated commentary. It was hard to figure out Coetzee’s meaning. Yet the fictive device had justified itself: one felt that the other participants had been content with their perfected errors while Coetzee, in his ...”

“... among other things, to be somewhere else’) and goes on to describe Montaigne as putting ‘not self-satisfied understanding but a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence’. Astonishment, fluidity and changefulness are inherently resistant to precepts which describe how they come about, and these things are Montaigne’s ...”

“... her own. Still, if she did not shower these particular scintillating adjectives on her flapper-self, her life proclaimed them. A flapper in the 1920s, like a post-feminist today, hovers between defiance and compliance. She embraces the subordination the previous generation fled, but calls it ‘brave and gay and beautiful’, not ...”

“... Isbell instead of bailing out, and he crashes. Isbell bails out, and soon recovers. Cassada’s self-sacrifice goes unnoticed: competence is what counts. Now that Isbell is viewed from the outside he is both more flawed – he sounds more mistakenly sure of himself – and more likeable than in The Arm of Flesh: ‘Isbell’s task was biblical. It was the ...”