“... Zuckerberg later sued each other, while Zuckerberg prospered, becoming the world’s youngest ‘self-made’ billionaire by 2008. That’s Mezrich’s plot. Soon it will be the plot of a film, The Social Network, with a script by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The West Wing. But most of Mezrich’s book is not plot, nor an explanation of how and why social ...”

“... persuade themselves that they are up against “human nature” itself.’ Christians aiming at self-improvement need look only to themselves: ‘Spiritual riches cannot be there, unless they come from you alone.’ This was a tough doctrine; Brown argues that it might have had a particular appeal to a Christian upper class now exiled from Rome and eager to ...”

“... father of New Historicism, Stephen Greenblatt made his professional reputation with Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980); but it was Will in the World (2004), his biographical account of ‘How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare’ that won him a huge advance. The established facts of Shakespeare’s life are either disappointingly pedestrian (records of ...”

“... not in response to a trauma in his past. Child has said he was ‘determined to avoid the hero-as-self-aware-damaged-person paradigm’; there was to be ‘no tedious self-pity’. Reacher has savings in the bank, more qualifications than he needs to dig swimming pools or work as a bouncer at a strip club – as he ...”

“... was told, was not so lucky, though he didn’t miss much. Obama’s most memorable lines were the self-regarding ones: ‘I’m no longer just a candidate. I’m the president.’ And then came an oddly aggrandising comparison of his own humility to Lincoln’s. It was treacle from there: the student who won the science fair while she was living in a homeless ...”

“... ammunition were still getting into the city. They agreed among themselves not to use the story. Self-censorship – or ‘engaged journalism’? Kapuściński was passionately engaged, and even used a gun in the Angola fighting when he was with the MPLA revolutionaries. (To be fair, he claimed it was in ...”

“... not his own. Back in Carrickfergus for the holidays, he confides to Blunt that ‘my artistic self … is mouldering here among the cabbages & well-intentioned people.’ (His realignment or reinvention of himself is accompanied by a name change: he starts to sign off as Louis, his middle name, rather than Freddie.) The MacNeice on display in these ...”

“... leave floating. Lisbon and Portugal imply or at least mirror the lives of (some of) their rich and self-indulgent citizens. Or is it the other way round? Either way a claim to explanation seems to be going too far, as it no doubt already was in Balzac. Balzac is named several times in The Maias. Two characters are said to have a ‘Balzacian eye’, and Balzac ...”

“... Hobbes fled to Paris in fear that his absolutist views might put him in danger. He would remain in self-imposed exile for 11 years. His revision of Elements was printed in Paris in 1642, and in 1647 the new version was published in extended and revised form as De Cive. It was the final defeat and execution of the king in 1649 that provoked Hobbes to compose ...”

“... more wedded to what-works politics than the Conservatives were under Thatcher, who was openly and self-consciously ideological. Much of the present malaise in British politics flows from this. Among other things, what-works gives the wrong answers. The classic example is the 42-day detention legislation. The only rational explanation for the government’s ...”

“... one recognises this can one understand why, throughout weeks of protest, people displayed so much self-discipline. This did not come from a fear of government revenge, but from a strong feeling of pride in their ability to take their fate into their own hands – visibly a legacy of the Chinese revolution and a socialist past. The crime rate in Beijing fell ...”

“... that was the creation of the 1688 Revolution? Are those who have seen 18th-century Britain as a self-consciously ‘modern’ nation merely projecting their own values back in time? Did the educated classes, outside the Court and the Government, yearn for old allegiances? Did the masses resent the German opportunists foisted on them as their kings? Yet ...”

“... he sees them – which isn’t to say he necessarily sees them right – and does not touch up his self-portrait. And he’s an iconoclast, a trait I have always found attractive. To be sure, it’s baffling that he managed to find so much Soviet-loving, ‘soft-on-Communism’ conventional wisdom in the United States to challenge; my own experiences in that ...”

“... rich. And always the cold corollary: if you failed, you’re a loser and have only your inadequate self to blame. Scott Sandage has written a splendid book about this American madness. He takes his chorus from Emerson: ‘There is always a reason, in the man, for his good or bad fortune.’ Talented workers grow rich. Sandage contends that this myth ...”

“... paradises are the paradises one has lost.’ The wording of Patterson and Prendergast is clear and self-contained, makes sense on its own. Scott Moncrieff sounds oracular rather than aphoristic; we shan’t know what his words mean until we have worked on them. There is nothing wrong with any of these versions, and there is no court of appeal in the French ...”