“... writes in Pope Francis: Untying the Knots (2013), ‘was not some natural modesty, bashfulness or self-effacement’. It was, rather, an act of will in the spirit of Jesuit self-discipline: ‘His will must seek to impose on a personality which has its share of pride and a propensity to dogmatic and domineering ...”

“... for pragmatic reasons, empowered DPs and legitimised anti-Soviet feelings. Encouraged to establish self-governing institutions, ‘Soviet’ DPs organised themselves by nationality, building the schools, churches, youth groups and civic associations that underwrote what it meant to be ‘Latvian’ or ‘Ukrainian’ or ‘Russian’. The camps fostered new ...”

“... over and reflect on one another, accumulating into a kaleidoscopic portrait of a disenfranchised self. Hoffmann appears at the end of this tale too and it has been read as an autobiographical fiction that deals with his ill-fated love for a teenage music student of his, Julia Marc. His repetition shapes events both within and between his texts – it raises ...”

“... of the two superpowers capable of destroying the other with nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union was self-evidently weaker than the US in economic, diplomatic, reputational and (for most of the period) military terms. That inequality, and Soviet resentment of it, is at the heart of the stories Zubok and Radchenko tell.Looking back wistfully to the days of the ...”

“... relation thought Aunt Jane could have accepted him only while suffering ‘a momentary fit of self-delusion’. It is possible that Bigg-Wither’s sisters encouraged him to make the proposal to their friend; Austen might, like Charlotte, have decided on reflection that his professed ‘attachment to her must be imaginary’.Yet Charlotte’s ...”

“... held long-term visiting professorships, feature merely as places to which he went to escape the ‘self-absorption’ of the All Souls common room.If considered as a memoir, however, the book’s selectivity and partiality are intrinsic parts of its design and interest. By setting out so clearly his choices of who and what matters in ancient ...”

“... account of Linnaeus as we are likely to get for at least a generation.Despite his unflattering self-portrait, Linnaeus wasn’t modest. As a young man he drew up lists of the books he intended to publish, and much later in life, anxious to manage his posthumous reputation, he prepared several vitae of himself that he hoped would serve as material for ...”

“... revisions spilling over onto extra scraps of paper appended to the margins. For a largely self-taught young woman of that period, such a career was remarkable. As the exhibition’s curators note in the catalogue, it would have been near impossible for a Black woman. But Greene – whose ancestors, on both sides, included African Americans enslaved a ...”

“... to silence his ‘Toxic Inner Critic’ and become more assertive. Cusk adopted a mode of self-erasure; she has talked about an ‘annihilated perspective’ – what Faye calls a more passive ‘way of living in the world’. Key to the project was the fact that Cusk was looking for an alternative not just to the novel but to confessional ...”

“... Professional tennis requires extraordinary psychological capacities – obsessive focus, epic self-belief – so it would be surprising if the players at the top were perfectly well adjusted. Being motivated by an insatiable desire to win, no matter the physical or emotional cost, is more like a pathology than healthy competitive spirit. It’s striking ...”

“... Though words are just where Thatcher couldn’t match her. It’s easy for the Yanks to preach self-help: There’s so much protein they can help themselves. In Britain we’d be feeding children kelp And watching them grow up the size of elves Were we to heed the age-old Tory yelp That’s heard when the tinned goods on the shop shelves Are priced so as ...”

“... preference, in intellectual history, for the subversive and rancorous over the official and self-congratulatory’. Even here, the irony is strong, the pairs of contrasting attitudes unattractive. The obvious worry is that the second narration will compromise the objectivity of the first. The prose, which consists of intricately-crafted and qualified ...”

“... quest begins in the psychological wastes of London, where everyone he meets is trapped in arid self-satisfaction, and he himself is unable to write. ‘In London, I had gone stale and dry.’ Setting out for the renewing waters of his childhood dreams, he passes through the Minnesota State Fair (a hybrid of Vanity Fair and Langland’s ‘fair field full ...”

“... terms of other people’s malevolence, rather than his unfittedness. To write the biography of so self-centred and self-absorbed a figure almost exclusively from his own papers necessarily results in the tortured reasoning, the special pleading and the selective use of evidence which are all displayed here in a vain attempt ...”

“... sympathetically and reassuringly to me on my arrival had meant a great deal to me: but even their self-assurance was in large part derived from the fact that they knew they were parts of a system much larger than themselves. However, the system did have a haphazard workhouse or almshouse side to its activities whose existence I would never have suspected ...”