“... Victoria in 1897. The thumping Unionist electoral triumph of 1895 was confidently ascribed by Sir Robert Ensor (who had been a Winchester schoolboy at the time) to an upsurge of expansionist imperialism, while A.G. Gardiner, the biographer of Sir William Harcourt, spoke of ‘a tidal wave of Jingoism’, as ‘the arrogant nationalism of Mr Kipling and the ...”

“... was not a hypocrite in any conventional sense, in that his behaviour was neither primarily self-serving nor inconsistent. It was North’s sincerity that enabled him to subvert the institutions for which he worked, and turn them against their own principles. ‘His main moral fault was not that he failed to be true to himself,’ Thompson ...”

“... are clearly a product of the late 1960s and early 1970s hippy shift from political action to ‘self-actualisation’, often through some kind of psychic or spiritual awakening. In The Lion, this shows itself in the doubled masculine crisis of a father’s midlife reinvention and a son’s journey from adolescence to manhood. Hoban’s work at times flows ...”

“... Crusade, the only eyewitness view from Byzantium, in which she portrays the Norman adventurer Robert Guiscard and his son Bohemond with horrified fascination. In a period that witnessed the gradual loss of Asia Minor to the Turks, the emergence of Venice and Pisa as maritime powers and the formulation of holy war ideologies in western Christendom and ...”

“... of production might destroy or damage the planter’s crop. It took nerve and courage and immense self-confidence (Breen likens it to virtu) to become ‘a lord of the soil’ – that is to say, to get a good price and, equally important, to be respected for the quality of his leaf. Good management signified ‘private virtue’: to criticise a planter’s ...”

“... and not one made by Charles Higham, whose moral fervour in telling this wretched story twangs with self-righteousness. There’s talk of ‘moral cesspools’ and ‘man-hungry, tweedy heiresses’ – it’s a world where God and Charles Higham sit in judgment and everybody gets their just deserts. You might think that a man whose lovers include Katharine ...”

“... now have a laureate. The immense success of the two Mole books and their spin-offs is a tribute to self-awareness.* The public, like a man who finds his symptoms are no mere concatenation but a syndrome, need no longer suspect itself of hypochondria. Sue Townsend’s descriptions ring true, the word is out: kids, parents, pets and geriatrics are all in this ...”

“... of the Mississippi delegation. An enraged President immediately gets on the phone to ol’ buddy Robert Kintner, head of the National Broadcasting Company: ‘Get those god-damned cameras off those niggers! Get them off right now!’ Still more numerous are little scenes intended to give us a whiff of the sweet smell of success and the sourness of failure ...”

“... every year – they remain ‘British’, for Rees-Mogg, because of their superior wealth and self-sufficiency. ‘It is the Florida effect,’ he said in a House of Commons speech. ‘People want to go to southern European countries, but they take their wealth with them, which would be welcomed even if we were not members of the EU because poor countries ...”

“... off Australia’s west coast on 3 October 1952 also dramatises the yearning and anxiety in British self-consciousness after the war. Soon after the test, the Daily Graphic apostrophised William Penney, the project’s leader: ‘Britain and the Commonwealth owe a debt – almost impossible to repay – to you ... the fact that you and your team have made it ...”

“... The great experimental chemist of the previous generation, Joseph Priestley, had believed it self-evident that the progress of reason and science would lead to a general reformation of religion and politics: ‘The English hierarchy (if there be anything unsound in its constitution) has equal reason to tremble even at an air pump, or an electrical ...”

“... down to see whether one of these sentences isn’t poking out of her side.’They’re also less self-enclosed than they appear. The surreal images in The Book of Words, and the monologue’s disjointed structure, eventually resolve with disturbing clarity: as an infant, the narrator was taken from her birth parents, who were ‘disappeared’ in a dirty war ...”

“... and racism even in notes to his mum was, for Amis, a sign of humourless cultural Stalinism. He and Robert Conquest had also been amused by advance word of Larkin’s letters to Barbara Pym (‘I bet they were a bit different in tone from what he writes to you and me, eh?’). At the same time, he was unsettled by finding out how much Larkin had kept from him ...”

“... Thus, Nichols presents her own history, and her family’s, as a story that is both highly self-conscious and almost implausibly apt for the present day. Her mother stood up to Al Capone’s brother, who then said to her father (after she revealed the hidden six-shooter): ‘You’ve got yourself one helluva little lady there.’ Later, Nichols herself ...”

“... 1430s and often described as the first autobiography in English – as a powerful assertion of her self in the world. The self Margery describes is different from our modern understanding of that word, however, and not only because she appears, with perhaps feigned humility, as a mere ‘creature’. As Barbara Newman shows ...”