“... all. The work is not without charm or felicities of style, but it is pretty thin stuff: precious, self-indulgent fluff. It is also true, however, that had Brautigan been an Easterner, an Ivy League graduate, a habitué of upper Manhattan literary soirées, he might well have been allowed a gentler landing. But he was not any of those things: he was a ...”

“... What emerged was everybody’s idea of a certain kind of windy politician. Disraeli, an expert in self-fashioning, said that England, subject to fogs and a large middle class, required grave statesmen. But Kinnock was not a grave statesman. Indeed, that is one of his more attractive features. At the time, however, his seeming to be neither witty nor grave ...”

“... they should have anticipated the attacks. An outspoken juror dismissed all that as shoddy self-delusion: ‘This is Monday-morning quarterbacking.’ Foden is similarly reluctant to offer any last-ditch explanations. By and large, Zanzibar is too alert and understated to try to be wise after the event. Foden’s first novel, The Last King of ...”

“... like to believe, ‘is not a whimsical judgment’, because according to him those ‘parodic, and self-parodic, elegies are technically among the finest poems Larkin wrote during the decade, with an assured delicacy of tone far beyond anything in The North Ship.’ Just as ‘Larkin, the mature poet, was later to transfigure the clichés of urban folklore and ...”

“... unrelated figures who didn’t write anything at all about his op-ed. I found all this tiresome, self-indulgent and more than a little embarrassing. Still, there must be many more for whom Goldberg’s obsessive return to his own humiliation is compelling, one of the reasons the book has moved up the bestseller charts so briskly. No matter how much power its ...”

“... Military successes were wrapped up with the stylised Prussian virtues of austerity, duty and self-sacrifice to make a powerful Hohenzollern mystique. A cult of Frederick the Great flowered as early as the 1750s, in sermons, poems, ballads and silk sashes that bore the message ‘long live the king.’ Frederick and his successors were adept at playing up ...”

“... but few of them succeeded. Centuries ago, Descartes suggested, plausibly, that the attempt is self-defeating. There is, I should add, another way to respond to the hard problem. One might hold that the world isn’t made entirely of matter after all; there is also a fundamentally different kind of stuff – mind-stuff, call it – and consciousness ...”

“... of the reality normally required by biographers is known; and given the value of the myth for the self-validation of the England reborn in the Reformation. This is how Foxe introduced Wyclif: ‘Thus, in these so great and troublous times and horrible darkness of ignorance, what time there seemed in a manner to be no one so little spark of pure doctrine left ...”

“... her husband became an icon of the New Woman. Ibsen’s use of such subjects riled censors and self-appointed moralists, but they don’t explain the enduring power of his plays, or how he came to invent an entirely new form of drama. Twentieth-century Modernists and their followers often dismiss Ibsen’s plays as so many stodgy living-rooms stuffed with ...”

“... punishments were for the most part corporal. Far more than ours, this was a tactile society, and self-consciously so in that it was increasingly suspicious of spiritual and immaterial entities. The words ‘embodied’ and ‘corporeal’ were newly invented to identify those qualities that can be experienced by touch – by the end of the century these were ...”

“... other lore?’ By the end of her exhaustive chronicle of local history and legend the answer is self-evident: ‘Why is the Hudson Valley haunted? Perhaps a better question after all is: how on earth could it not be?’ Until I read this book, the Hudson Valley seemed remote from anguished, obviously possessed sites like ravaged towns in Mississippi and ...”

“... himself is a king who is distracted from the serious business of just rule into luxurious self-indulgence by figures such as Fancy, Cloaked Collusion and Courtly Abusion; downfall and despair follow, until he is narrowly rescued from suicide by Good Hope, Redress and Sad Circumspection. The play belongs with the medieval tradition of direct ...”

“... to take seriously. If Shteyngart were serious about Misha, he would make the poor slob pay for his self-absorption. He cannot do this, in part because he cannot see far enough past his own jokes to work out whether Misha is the vehicle or the target of the satire. Is Misha the cynic who can deftly satirise the Holocaust in a grant proposal, or the gullible ...”

“... existed. But he appears to have been the first to ask at what speed they travel. It is taken as self-evident, in popular texts at least, that this must be the speed of light, though there is no obvious reason why there should be only one universal speed in nature. Before him, physicists had assumed that the consistency of physics required the speed of ...”

“... the provincial.’ And, the Soviet filmmaker was too polite to add, America the racist, the self-righteous and the white supremacist. The depiction of the entire Civil War is merely a prelude to the madness of the movie’s final hour: an orgy of arson and rape, anarchy, revolution and counter-revolution, human sacrifice and hair’s-breadth rescue, the ...”