“... of Labour’s moral high ground on the tax front and the realisation that their own economic self-interest might dictate otherwise. I must confess that I find the holier-than-thou streak in British political culture a mite off-putting. One needs only to hint that wholly state-run provision of a service might not always be the optimum choice, or even that ...”

“... deal with the Romans and the Italian Renaissance, when memorial art is most gloriously secular and self-fulfilling and least concerned with death. As Colvin points out, the architect’s best client is a dead client, or at least one who will be dead by the time they move in, and will therefore not require drainage, windows, or any other facilities that might ...”

“... equivalents of Kilmuir and Dilhorne. Black was a Methodist lay preacher; Sir Cyril Osborne, a self-made businessman, informed the Commons that he had been ‘brought up as a Victorian by a very stern Victorian father’ and knew it was perfectly possible for homosexuals to control themselves if they were sufficiently determined. Although Berkeley won the ...”

“... of polyhistoriographical ambitions explains why certain titles ‘which sound like Baroque self-parodies’ were still in use up to and during the Enlightenment. One of these books, cited by Grafton, was Pancirolli’s De rebus inventis et deperditis (1599). This book, which happens to be one of the few I’ve read that Grafton apparently hasn’t, was ...”

“... while the audience was packed with enraged veterans waving flags, wild-eyed alien abductees and self-proclaimed victims of satanic ritual abuse. ‘You didn’t have a single ally in there,’ Nancy said to me after the show as we waited for an armed guard to escort us to her car. ‘Lady, you have balls!’ In New York the next morning, I ended the tour ...”

“... need. For those readers who have little to show for the hours they spend here – how do you prove self-improvement? – the pale oak, travertine, black leather and brass, the comfort and grandeur, may bring a twinge of guilt. If the intention had been to site the library in a place which would emphasise the spectrum of privilege/misery in this country no ...”

“... no concept of liberty, no autonomous corporate institutions and assemblies, no ‘city’, no self-confident middle class. Many of the institutions through which popular power is channelled in Western societies originated in the Church, the paradigm for the corporate bodies through which power is now routinised and mediated in impersonal ...”

“... of these sacred accessories is itself a symbol of growing economic and religious freedom in Cuba. Self-employment is allowed as a means of rescuing the country from the financial pass it has found itself in since Moscow stopped the cheques half a dozen years ago. And last year Cubans enjoyed their first real Christmas for almost forty years, emboldened by ...”

“... to be reminded for a while – certainly not at the time when Kipling was already at his lonely, self-appointed task. This labour of love, which incidentally gave its author the stomach ulcers which were eventually to kill him, was not written for outsiders, but what it conveys most authentically is the hardest thing of all to convey to outsiders: why did ...”

“... purity have always brought calamity on themselves and others, so the families and houses that self-select for breeding have declined in a welter of cretinism and porphyria, to say nothing of disputed codicils. Nonetheless, the interest in forebears and provenance is human and natural and often harmless – or absurd, as in the thousand generations of ...”

“... may be the beginning of moral inquiry, the low end of the Platonic ladder that leads to self-understanding … If marriage is, as Mill suggested, a political experience, then discussion of it ought to be taken as seriously as talk about national elections.Marriages set two imaginations to work constructing narratives about experience presumed to be ...”

“... the Dutch Supreme Court. It would be easy to conclude that the judges were taken in by a master of self-publicity, particularly when you look at a photo taken the following year: Reve with his arms around a real donkey, kissing its nose and looking knowingly into the camera. But what’s interesting – and this is one of the things that makes him more than ...”

“... Romans revered ancestry while affecting to reject dynasty. A Roman aristocrat’s sense of self was the sum of ancestral virtues and vices, successes and failures. Agrippina’s ambitions, for herself and for her son, should be understood in that light. They were destined for greatness; it was both owed to them and demanded of them. Nero lacked the ...”

“... yes, the firmness and the courage and the faith of someone who has achieved something through self-reliance. What’s the use of shuffling along timidly in one’s own country? Warĩĩnga, the black beauty! Warĩĩnga of the mind and hands and body and heart, walking in rhythmic harmony on life’s journey! Warĩĩnga, the worker!Now a mechanical ...”

“... want to hear.’ She makes a good living from teasing men. Male comedians have retreated to self-mockery; none of them would commit career suicide by teasing his female audience. But sometimes men like Li Dan get carried away. Li was recently invited by an underwear brand to promote a new bra (an odd choice) and decided to make a pun on tangying, which ...”