“... own manner here; McCrum quotes Wodehouse’s editor at Vanity Fair who remembered him as ‘self-effacing, slow-witted and matter of fact . . . I never heard him utter a clever, let alone a brilliant, remark.’ Wodehouse shows signs of impatience with this convention in The Code of the Woosters (1938) where Bertie drops some of his best witticisms to ...”

“... he was past that – but I did know that she was in every way inappropriate, that he was being self-pitying with someone to whom he ought, in my view, not to have revealed himself. He was being abject: not in, or with, his body as Freud dreamed of his father, but emotionally. I am not talking about my father in dreams – he almost never appears there ...”

“... a bit ‘like a jockey’. But everybody noticed that Nijinsky had a supernatural-seeming gift for self-transformation. It was a gift so extreme it had always seemed capable of unbalancing his mind. While watching him in Le Spectre de la rose, Cocteau remarked that Nijinsky was like ‘some melancholy, imperious scent’, that ‘evaporates through the window ...”

“... important for the speaker to consider what harm it can do. The second reason is that it promotes self-fulfilment – an aspect, perhaps, of the first reason. The last is that ‘freedom of speech is the lifeblood of a democracy.’ The physiological metaphor is apt because, as Lord Steyn goes on to point out, free speech enables opinion and fact to be ...”

“... rational acts of will, a therapeutic success story and a moral progress, a dietetic project of the self. It speaks from a culture in which it was possible to talk in the same idiom, as Guerrini nicely puts it, about ‘the triangle of food, flesh, and spirit’, and in which medicine addressed all three but did not own the exclusive rights to talk intelligibly ...”

“... as the collision of a pure spirit and a vulgar one, but Strauss was being his usual pragmatic self: mayors needed to be attended to, even after death. In these years of Strauss’s greatest fame, Mahler, who suffered from the Wagnerian disease of mistaking the personal for the world-historical, began to speak of the insignificance of contemporary musical ...”

“... fiercely independent sister Alice, Gordon sternly checks herself: ‘Even if these two women were self-sufficient, that does not entirely absolve’ him. ‘Why, when ten and a half thousand letters of Henry James were allowed to survive,’ her opening pages ask portentously, ‘did he make a pact with Fenimore to destroy their correspondence?’ That ...”

“... Its members are ruthless; they have remarkable organisational skills, a tremendous capacity for self-sacrifice and self-discipline, and a deep hatred of the United States and the Western way of life. As Richard Hofstader and others have argued, for more than two hundred years this kind of combination has always acted as a ...”

“... to say that Hunt didn’t possess his own kind of vanity, ‘a little over-bearing, over-weening self-complacency’, as Hazlitt described it. When he and his brother John were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in 1812 for libelling the Prince Regent, Hunt offered a teasingly serene, not to say Skimpolean face to the public: ‘Our Prosecutors will ...”

“... did the epic history of the raids never get written? Sebald suspects a process of ‘pre-conscious self-censorship: a way of obscuring a world that could no longer be presented in comprehensible terms’. The ‘now legendary and in some respects genuinely admirable’ reconstruction prevented any backward view. There was a silent agreement, equally binding on ...”

“... manipulated by their social betters, the ruling gentry and nobility, with a supporting cast of self-interested clergy? The first question has been in many ways badly framed. For one thing, the Pilgrimage was not a monolith. The articulated grievances of Richmondshire and Westmorland had to do with rents and entry fines; the issues in Lincolnshire fell ...”

“... base.’ The indefeasible good humour of his characters is Queneau’s gift to the deserving. High self-esteem was for Queneau the most blameable of vices; its absence a sufficient virtue. So it is with the Chaplinesque Pierrot, who has few if any talents and little luck, but whose final response to losing various jobs and the girl he is keen on is to burst ...”

“... In 1965, Willeford finally settled down. He took a teaching job, published a couple more books, self-published a collection of his poetry entitled Poontang and Other Stories – sex and death mostly. He saw Monte Hellman direct the movie of Cockfighter, got divorced again, appeared as a bartender in Thunder and Lightning (like Cockfighter, it was produced ...”

“... ignored. But as the old state clings on, a sort of parallel, civil-society government has been self-organising. It feeds and equips the army, provides legal and social services to internally displaced refugees, brings medical aid to those who are stuck in war zones both on the Ukrainan and the rebel-held side. For all the bad news there appears to be some ...”

“... them. From its first meeting in March 1920 the Memoir Club was on the lookout for incidental self-revelation. On that occasion there were seven speakers. It was ‘highly interesting’, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, adding: ‘Lord knows what I didn’t read into their reading.’ Supposedly a secret society, it largely remained so until after the ...”