“... Renaissance arguments than the painter needed to know; and this is not, as has been claimed, a self-contradiction, but the plain outcome of the undeniable fact that we no longer enjoy the advantages of Renaissance conversation. We must make up for it through reading and inference. I hear Bull snorting derisively in the wings. Renaissance conversation, one ...”

“... her way with great care and deliberation’ in London society. ‘The consequence is a (socially) self-conscious style of writing that often – especially in the late work – comes inflected with a disturbing mood or tone of bad faith. Again and again the poetry seems oblique, or held in reserve, or ...”

“... But it seems more likely that they were put off by her combination of aggressive sexuality and self-centredness – effectively, a grab for attention on Freeman’s part that violated the unspoken rules of the narrative compact. (One contributor tried to convince herself that Freeman intended her chapter as a satire, though the evidence shows that it was ...”

“... that a revolutionary cannot afford such sentimentality – as proof of his excessive powers of self-control. However, might this anecdote not simply bear witness to an extreme sensitivity, and Lenin’s knowledge that it needed to be kept in check for the sake of the political struggle? In their very triviality, the details of the Bolsheviks’ daily lives ...”

“... the remotest event, the smallest recorded detail, may have meaning: its inclusion is therefore self-justifying; in any case, Parker, like all great scholars, loves what he knows. He knows the topography of Boston and New York, the evolving social history of a neighbourhood or particular street; he knows the route of the Democratic Party parade through ...”

“... a whole. Breivik’s hero Fjordman has graduated from the web to the pages of the Aftenposten, a self-described ‘conservative-liberal’ newspaper. He’s also writing a book about Utøya, partly subsidised by a fellowship from the Fritt Ord Foundation, Norway’s most prestigious free speech organisation. Nygaard, who is now the chairman of PEN ...”

“... phenomena, Cartledge argues, rendered less congenial both Thucydides’ ‘severe, and somewhat self-deluding claim … to tell objectively and accurately only the actual facts of the past’, and his decision to limit those facts to ‘significant political, diplomatic and military events and processes’. But the recent expansion beyond Thucydidean ...”

“... vulnerable countries with low emissions. But in this case it is not necessarily just a matter of self-interest prevailing over honesty and virtue. Climate change creates what Gardiner calls ‘a perfect moral storm’, within which it is difficult to keep one’s bearings. The key elements of this storm, which he enumerates with admirable – if exhausting ...”

“... leather and a little cap such as Orton himself used to wear. Here too an outfit that is not so self-conscious would serve the play better. The more ordinary it is the more shocking it will seem. 3 February. One of the cards of condolence we get on Anne’s death is unintentionally comical. ‘Sorry to hear your bad news!’ The exclamation mark is ...”

“... stomach and the rest of the body, and through the stomach’s role in transforming sustenance into self, anything that went wrong in the guts could wind up disordering not just the mind but the liver, heart, gall bladder, spleen, pancreas, lungs and skin. In addition to complaints located in the stomach, the dyspeptic might suffer ...”

“... advised Parliament to give Britain’s press one last 18-month chance to prove the efficacy of self-regulation. The outcome was the ill-starred PCC, and two decades of non-regulation. If Leveson is to have a more substantial legacy, his report must engage with two issues in particular: the circumstances in which someone can sue for a violation of ...”

“... Leavis and he had deliberately chosen them,’ Hilliard says. Ellis confirms this impression of a self-selecting and self-perpetuating praetorian guard of literary criticism: ‘Almost all my fellow students had been taught by men who were either former pupils of Leavis or very sympathetic to his point of view.’ It has ...”

“... give way to further, vaguer figures and an infinitely extended and repeating world far beyond the self. Finally, Dorothea is brought back, with Eliot’s moral firmness, to a middle place between two repudiated ways of seeing or not seeing the world – neither just looking nor failing to look at all. Dorothea will now plunge back into selfless engagement ...”

“... had been misused, and for many years the original Dusklands jacket was the only instance of arch self-display in an otherwise spotless record of authorial impersonality. In the 1980s and 1990s Coetzee’s dislike of being interviewed led to fraught encounters with journalists and much recourse to the Cape Town rumour mill. ‘A colleague who has worked with ...”

“... Deutscher and by Trotsky himself, which Service sees as over-sympathetic on Deutscher’s part and self-serving on Trotsky’s, but he keeps this out of the text (and doesn’t use the footnotes to quarrel with other historians). Some reviewers have seen Service as hostile to his subject, but I see it not so much as hostility as a satisfaction in being ...”