“... went on to open other clubs in Europe, while in Paris Chez Régine opened in 1960, catering to the self-styled beautiful people. The upmarket thrills of Régine’s enjoyed by the American jet-set in turn inspired New York’s Le Club, although it didn’t last long, closing soon after a new venue in New York took off in 1961: the Peppermint Lounge. The ...”

“... their Scottishness, and her belated vindication supplying an implicit focus for their collective self-assertion. In the age of post-Revolutionary national movements, Mary becomes an analogue of Marianne (emblem of her people’s liberty, for whom the fraternal citizenry are willing to shed their blood), or even of Marie-Antoinette (personification of her ...”

“... live in seclusion, until he was awarded the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. This infuriated the self-righteous Moynier, who in the latter part of his 46-year stint as president, tried hard to expunge any mention of Dunant from the organisation’s records. Such contradictions are the stuff of the Red Cross, whose ‘International Committee’ was, until ...”

“... bush, the Labour movement or Australian nationalism. In the Australian Nineties, a period which self-consciously but justifiably felt itself to be alive with the possibility of a new national culture, Brennan isolated himself. He took on, or was forced into, the role of the metropolitan in the colonies. But he was a metropolitan without a ...”

“... evangelical activity which we habitually associate with Puritan opposition. It was a surprisingly self-confident church, too. In its infancy, under Elizabeth, its very survival had been doubtful. The improvised combination of Calvinist theology and episcopal government had seemed frail and eccentric. But as the decades passed, the morale and the standing of ...”

“... because they show you at your very worst. You seem to slip out of my grasp and become again the self-conscious précieux you were when I found you – the man who reads over his letters and writes one word over another as if his wife was a printer.’ Crawford feels it can’t have been easy for Ashbee ‘to live with someone who had so definitely got his ...”

“... pure Morris: an eye and ear attentive to the way we look and talk, without ever lapsing into the self-indulgent journalism or sociology that makes up our best-seller lists; a heart and mind determined to face the deepest questions, without ever lapsing into existentialist clichés or easy religious formulae. It is a mixture that has naturally led critics to ...”

“... who speculate), the fight against inflation, or better still, the achievement of deflation, is self-evidently the only blessed cause. But central bankism would be politically weak if it did not also attract the support of the passive Left everywhere – the Left that is much concerned with the welfare of ordinary working stiffs but unwilling to risk any ...”

“... Candour & Comfort & Coffee & Cribbage’), Johnsonian lapidary pronouncement (‘I am looking over Self Control again, & my opinion is confirmed of its’ being an excellently meant, elegantly written Work, without anything of Nature or Probability in it’), the effusions of Mrs Radclyffe (‘the shades of Evening are descending & I resume my interesting ...”

“... in the novel. At Schlossburg, Henri Mensonge, scheduled to speak on the totally deconstructed self, fails to arrive: Bradbury loves a donnish joke. It all winds up with a postscript set in Norwich. At a staid University Teachers of English get-together George Steiner, Frank Kermode and Seamus Heaney do their party pieces and a novelist – the author of ...”

“... history. For example, the collection of papers edited by Peter Burke and Roy Porter, Language, Self and Society. This, you’d think (I thought), is just what is needed to excite a fresh interest in the history of English. Well, I thought wrong. The volume is too miscellaneous in topic and treatment to fulfil the claims of its subtitle, and the more ...”

“... like the one that burns in mine. My ear hears in this passage uncertainty, fear, pain, love, self-deprecation, style (‘I cannot be admired. I am not a thing to be admired’) and humour (‘snub-nos’d brunettes with meeting eyebrows’) – but I do not hear anything that could conceivably be described as a squeal. It is unsettling, in a biography of ...”

“... a message to reassure his white supporters that they need not hesitate to use armed ‘self-defence’, a practice legalised in recent years by ‘stand your ground’ laws (walking or driving in some white neighbourhoods has become an increasingly dangerous activity for black people). He has stoked divisions and released his followers from any ...”

“... political landscape, the nation and national pride bulk ever larger, bolstering our sense of self-worth, tickling up our resentments. This emboldened nationalism has a weather-beaten old ally in the shape of the popular newspapers, which are jubilant about Brexit, not without reason regarding its achievement as largely their own work – ‘yes, we did ...”

“... all doubled up as art critics. (The bullish Courbet took on both tasks: doing the work and the self-promotion.) It helped that there were extraordinary new artists to support, as well as a hulking and immobile target to attack: the annual Salon. The Académie des Beaux-Arts organised it, controlled who and what was shown, awarded prizes and public ...”