“... to Charles occasionally extended into denunciations of kingship itself, but in the 1640s the self-professed detesters of monarchy never probed beyond their detestation. They did not trouble themselves with questions of constitutional architecture or wonder how to empower an alternative executive authority while preserving the liberties kingship allegedly ...”

“... of plagues since the Middle Ages.Johnson’s insouciance goes hand in hand with his gargantuan self-confidence. So it’s not surprising that his reaction to these embarrassments has been to double down. Instead of standing back and letting better-qualified people make the decisions, Superman proposes, according to the Daily Telegraph of 3 June, to ‘take ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of life on an Italian island to be discussed – and not infrequently duplicitous. Writing a self-confessed ‘fan letter’ to Britten about the premiere of Peter Grimes, he is also shooting off a note to the copyist Roy Douglas asking: ‘Did you see or hear “Grimy Peter”?’ Asperities about fellow composers are in plentiful supply. Tippett was ...”

“... that the plot confirms, while sensible figures within the text diagnose the ‘circles of self-reference’ and ‘echo chambers’ in which his mind wanders. Like the novel’s witchy madwoman, who is also a reader of occult signs, Lamb apparently possesses real powers of divination – powers that the novel never chooses to explain away. The ...”

“... exterminate all Armenian males of 12 years and over’. On 20 April, the Armenians of Van rose in self-defence, and held on till a Russian advance reached them in May. Four days later, as British forces were about to land at Gallipoli, Armenian deputies and former ministers were arrested. In Anatolia, the killings and deportations spread, supposedly to clear ...”

“... carries a somewhat dispiriting freight of gentle and inevitably golden-haired charmers, their self-sacrificing attentions entirely focused on men, she did once tentatively suggest, in her novel Lodore (1835), a very different scenario. Fanny Derham in that book, a young woman of superior intellect and learning, is described as ‘more made to be loved by ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... anonymous personality’, whereby the painting would stand by and for itself, unsigned and self-free. It was all this, and all as high-minded as this; but it was also personal, playful, companionable. It was Braque teasing (and delighting) the dressy Picasso by buying him a hundred hats at a public auction in Le Havre; it was Buffalo Bill and ...”

“... Foster in seeking a technological base for the change – he seizes on the introduction of the self-acting mule in the spinning industry – but otherwise he will have none of this. He maintains that, on the contrary, the spinners were not sharply divided from the rest of the labour force, from whom they were recruited and who comprised their own wives and ...”

“... Establishment between the wars, and especially the gap between its rhetoric and its ambitions. ‘Self-determination of peoples’ had been a con-trick as far as the defeated peoples of 1918 had been concerned; so was the League of Nations. ‘Reparations’, the Gold Standard, German Democracy, the Little Entente were all of them bogus – like the Maginot ...”

“... would often seem to elude the Scot. The Magic Glass, then, is not concerned with putting the whole self together. Rather it slices off a childhood, and leaves it disconnected, a preparation for nothing. There remains, however, an uneasiness, as if the author felt obliged to offer something more in the way of a portrait of the editor as a young woman. The ...”

“... a letter-writer, is never, as Hart-Davis’s is, rounded off into what amounts to a lightly-drawn self-portrait. The portrait of Hart-Davis gives design to the collection, and almost makes the Letters into a story (though a very different one from the work in question) in the manner of such novels in letters as Les Liaisons Dangereuses. One appreciates that ...”