“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he wrote to one of his girlfriends. ‘Perhaps because she never does anything to shatter my self-confidence or vanity.’ After his death she remembered ‘the joy of reading the letter’ containing what Julian called ‘great news’: he was sleeping with Anthony Blunt – his ‘first love affair’. She realised then that he ‘meant to tell me ...”

“... spirited? Yet Frank was keener than E.P. on sacrifice, which he linked with the immersion of the self in some larger instance: for a budding scholar, the quest for the Sangreal might have been a model (the Winchester manuscript of Morte d’Arthur was discovered in the College library in his second year), but in the end the man of action was drawn to the ...”

“... law with a rhetoric of religious nationalism and righteous victimhood.) Isolation has nourished self-reliance, self-reliance has encouraged sacrifice, and sacrifice is widely seen as proof of virtue. The Islamic Republic’s tenacity during the war with Iraq should give pause to anyone who imagines that it will bend under ...”

“... his punchlines with an interjection of ‘Hey-hey what!’ We see him as Major Sturgeon, a self-deluding old booby in The Mayor of Garrett; as Zachary Fungus in The Commissary; as Dr Hellebore in The Devil upon Two Sticks; and – his best-loved creation – mob-capped and shawled as Mrs Cole in The Minor. This prototypical pantomime dame was also a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that posh English society was no match for him. He was ‘vulgar’, but there was a charm in his self-promotion which made languid ladies and gentlemen want to be on his side and at his side. He was wildly rich even then, but knew how to use his wealth in hospitality and (discreetly) by rescuing grand friends from awkward debts. Above all, he was fun to be ...”

“... palaver of generations because, simple to the point of transparency, it is also impenetrably self-enclosed. It is held in a brilliant web of balance and contradiction by a few hundred words; so it is worth looking at those words and what they actually mean. Just to be clear: there was no seduction. There was no devil, nor any mention of Satan, who ...”

“... he forgets what he has done. When his opinions are ingrained they are immovable. In another self-serving anecdote for which Cohn must be the source, Woodward reports this circular exchange: Several times Cohn asked the president, ‘Why do you have these views?’ ‘I just do,’ Trump replied. ‘I’ve had these views for 30 years.’ ‘That ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... vows was lax indeed. Her entire upbringing and education led her to become skilled in the art of self-suppression and pretence. She had pretended she was rich; now she could pretend she was, as the phrase goes, happily married. During her years in the White House she did the second of these with immense style and care and some success, so that her ...”

“... Post’s South Asia bureau chief, based in New Delhi. Given the CIA’s paranoid and often self-defeating secrecy, what makes his book especially interesting is how he came to know what he claims to know. He has read everything on the Afghan insurgency and the civil wars that followed, and has been given access to the original manuscript of Robert ...”