“... do not see themselves as hard done by – is just one more example of the twisted mentality of self-exploitation that has spread through the world of employment in the last decade and a half. Today, there is reasonably broad agreement on what constitutes fair labour in the waged workplace, or there are limits at least to the range of disagreement. People ...”

“... between. His voice is precious, deluded, and becomes increasingly claustrophobic. The fastidious self-justifications involve the reader in uncomfortable trains of thought. His duplicity has a seductive logic: is cheating wrong if no one finds out? Isn’t having many selves more adventurous than having just one? Since we will all die, isn’t renunciation of ...”

“... about painting and how it’s done that no one else thinks to tell you – of an Alice Neel nude self-portrait, for example: ‘Her face is rather tight around the mouth, as a painter’s face can be when reaching a decision about just how a detail seen in the mirror can be put down with the next stroke’ – or maybe has noticed: ‘It comes to you that ...”

“... was entitled to what he or she could afford. For some, such as certain Chicago economists, the new self-restraint was difficult to understand: their model of ‘rational economic man’ didn’t seem to fit this case. To many people today, having gone through the purgative fires of Thatcherism, all that community spirit may seem too good – or too illogical ...”

“... between eerie fragility and just enough decisiveness – insect lightness contending with a half-self-mocking monumentality – was never struck ...”

“... of what they were is still with us mentally, and Holt’s mind ensures that he is not the only self in that room. And what about people we think of often and scarcely see? Or people we don’t know at all but think about because we read what they write or because others tell stories of them? How could the deaths of these sets of people make a ...”

“... despite his desire to hide his relationships from the public in an effort to project an image of self-sacrifice and total devotion to the German people, Hitler is known to have had affairs with a number of women, and spent his last years in a conventional heterosexual partnership with Eva Braun, a woman considerably younger than himself. Fit and ...”

“... year or so, an illegal temptation, and not a passive one. My quest was dedicated and entirely self-regarding. I don’t think I ever thought about the desired men themselves as individuals with their own lives, only as emblems for something I needed and believed I could get from them. I made it hard for them to refuse. I didn’t, of course, force men to ...”

“... I couldn’t see an end to it all. These things were understandable even if my resolute lack of self-control was not. ‘No stickability, my girl,’ my father would say, warning me of trouble to come. More worrying, because mysterious, in my handiwork life was the way nothing I cut or measured, no matter how carefully, ever came out the right size. In ...”

“... the ‘solitude and sufferings’ of the Eikon’s title page? Is this why he wallowed in self-pity and spent himself in flirtations and illicit liaisons? Was he relieved to be free of the cares of government or was he desperate to regain his rightful inheritance? Should that day ever come, would he obey his father’s prayer on the scaffold to ...”

“... as telling in its way as the duchess’s ball, Gage admired the Rubens drawings and a Rembrandt self-portrait as he tiptoed round one of the casualties, a badly wounded ‘Hanoverian gent … fast asleep on a handsome couch’. The attempt to make this into any kind of Grand Tour faded as his days became increasingly overshadowed by the aftermath of the ...”

“... fine art teaching, he indulged his magpie sensibility, which seems thoroughly modern, unlike his self-discipline: ‘he will spend hours,’ Douglas Percy Bliss wrote, ‘covering a passage with tiny dots or flecks.’ One page of his scrapbook has a photograph of a crown, a little watercolour study (clouds?) and a scrollwork sketch alongside Cézanne’s ...”

“... turned on an argument in debate.’ Hawthorn prefers Book 8, in which the feints, smokescreens and self-deceptions of rhetoric have been cleared away and pure politics, the pursuit of goals through power, takes centre stage. It is here that he finds the work’s highest degree of ‘unillusion’, its most clear-eyed assessment of ‘the stuff of success and ...”

“... with Syriza’s performance and everyone takes it as read that the Troika’s prescriptions are self-defeating. News that the former prime minister George Papandreou wanted to take time off from Parliament for a stint as a lecturer at Harvard was greeted with a shrug. As for Alexis Tsipras, Syriza’s leader, nobody thinks his time in student politics was a ...”

“... or compensated to an extent that they had not been before and would not be by either informal self-regulation or regulation by a civil service department. Even if no engineer can design a heat engine capable of reaching more than 40 per cent of its maximum theoretical efficiency, 40 per cent is a lot more than ...”