“... to become the signing automaton of constitutional theory after his accession, Edward kept his self-respect by inverting the relative weight of political realities and their kingly representation. In his hawkish policing of the honours system and the details of court dress, Edward felt himself to be working hard. George, by virtue of being uxorious rather ...”

“... French West Indies and returning with cargoes of sugar and cotton. This was all very well, but no self-respecting entrepreneur could fail to notice that by adding another leg to these voyages, vastly greater profits could be made. Ships arriving in the West Indies from France could trade their load of manufactured cloth, brandy, wine and other goods for ...”

“... is that it is ‘the performance of personality’, an unswerving living out of the individual self. This makes it a highly ephemeral art form that leaves little more than anecdote behind. Given all of which, there is something perverse, if ultimately rewarding, in her attempt to bring academic analysis to bear on the subject at all. Generalising about ...”

“... to ‘duty’ and ‘the Firm’. By contrast, Diana had ‘soul’. She bared all about self-harm and her frequent calls, during her bulimic phase, on the great white telephone. She fondled children and animals, dabbled in New Age pursuits, kibitzed in operating theatres and had been stiffed on a pedalo by the thick-set offspring of a Levantine ...”

“... Both believed themselves to be beyond human laws; both lost sight of the difference between their self-love and the interests of the country they were ostensibly protecting. Both benefited from a culture of denunciation, in which people would betray their friends and relatives either to forestall the witchfinder’s finger coming to rest on them, or to gain a ...”

“... quality of SOP – Standard Operating Procedure. The other is its tendency continuously and self-consciously to produce itself, in the Hollywood sense of the word. Aim and action are not sufficient. Tasks must be dramatised. A plot has to be storyboarded. Dialogue has to be written in advance. Roles must be imagined, then cast. It was Moazzam Begg’s ...”

“... own interests before the public good, and to follow the evil advice of those corrupt and equally self-interested counsellors who seduced him along that road. These were the issues traversed in the copious ‘Mirror of Princes’ literature, to which Erasmus made the most famous contribution. Under the youthful Henry, all seemed set fair. Thomas More extolled ...”

“... produces idiocy, in the original sense of the word – confinement within the self, loss of contact with the real world and an inability to subscribe to a shared meaning. Lacking a common reference point, their only reference is to themselves and they are no longer capable of relating the world ‘out there’ to their representation of ...”

“... about the Holocaust and the camps. On the very first page we meet in Gyuri an observant, detached, self-obsessed boy who notices all details with crystal precision, and yet has no interest in the motives of other people, or in the background to what is taking place, unless they impact on his own hour-to-hour life. ‘I didn’t go to school today,’ the novel ...”

“... role in liberating those it treated from sexual and social repression. Reich, the group’s self-appointed leader, doubted whether ‘the bourgeoisie [could] live side by side with psychoanalysis for any length of time without damage to itself’. ‘In the 1920s and 1930s,’ Danto suggests, ‘analysts saw themselves as brokers of social change for ...”

“... that women should be passive and decorative singers who required male assistance rather than self-contained and innovative musicians. Yet the movement wasn’t made up only of worldly grown-ups such as the Raincoats’ Ana da Silva, who was 27 when they formed, had a doctorate and had written a thesis on Bob Dylan. It also contained excited ...”

“... nostalgic, ruralist conservatives. As Blackbourn relates, dam-building became a focus of German self-congratulation in the 1890s and the early 20th century. The Urft, Eder and Möhne dams were built before 1914, to vast popular enthusiasm. ‘Dam tourism’ developed, and a genre of ‘dam journalism’ offered ‘articles through which the vocabulary of ...”

“... but might he have meant more? Could this apparent misfit be understood in the context of his self-consciously ‘civilised’ age? The Highly Civilised Man treats Burton as an authentic product of his times rather than a flamboyant exception to them. The result is a clever intellectual history, structured around the chief guises ...”

“... 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 ...”