“... 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 ...”

“... and political engagement. As Zubok acknowledges, their Soviet schooling propagated ‘ideals of self-cultivation and self-improvement, and the pervasive cult of high culture … once intrinsic to the ethos of the Russian intelligentsia’; as a result, it produced young people ‘with intellectual curiosity, artistic ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and crowns, appears in the next chapter, in which England is cast (by Deasy) as a land of monetary self-sufficiency (though threatened by usurious Jewish merchants), while Ireland is recast (by Stephen) as a pawnshop, one to which he’s more in hock than most. The chapter ends as the sun profligately flings, through a chequerwork of leaves, dancing coins onto ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he himself had devised. The form the NHS took was inspired, according to Bevan’s account, by the self-organised, free-at-the-point-of-use health service set up by workers in Tredegar, the small mining town in the Sirhowy Valley where he was born and raised, and where he began his political career. Although he had the backing of the prime minister, Clement ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who had won a scholarship to read history at Trinity, fitted naturally into this highly-strung, self-consciously aesthetic milieu. He got round the rule forbidding pianos in students’ rooms by buying an antique dulcitone, an instrument undreamed of by the college authorities, overspent his generous allowance on ‘an impractically huge Breton oak ...”

“... quite neatly. Besteiro was the dreamy idiot. Casado, who pulled him into the conspiracy, was the self-dramatising, self-obsessed moron. Paul Preston, author of The Last Days of the Spanish Republic, hits hard from his first page. ‘This is the story of an avoidable humanitarian tragedy that cost many thousands of lives ...”

“... church on the feast days of the saints they commemorate, they reveal a great deal about Christian self-presentation – and very little about Julian. There is no compelling evidence for a widespread persecution of Christians actively or personally prosecuted by Julian. Certainly an unknown number of Christians died for their faith. Some were murdered by those ...”

“... which meant ‘creating not just an economic border but increasingly a culture of national self-supply’. ‘The British nation’, in other words, now implied a society committed to protectionism, to exporting (‘Export or Die’ was the slogan) at the cost of sharply reduced imports, and to a universal welfare state that existed within a culture of ...”