“... of social life, that Arnaud showed remarkable gifts for the presentation, or misrepresentation, of self, culminating in the courtroom scene where he remembered certain details of Martin’s early life better than Martin did, a point which impressed Montaigne and no doubt other members of the public. Following his usual line on the fallibility of human ...”

“... have been worthier of comment. Mr Pitcher does build up an engaging picture of the sedate and self-contained British colonies in Moscow and St Petersburg, with their curling club, football league, debating society and toytown ecclesiastical controversies, but too many of his stories end with an implicit ‘Phew! That was a narrow squeak!’ Industrial ...”

“... or by their mothers who duly inculcated the virtue of ‘femininity’ – comprising gentleness, self-sacrifice (always in the interest of the opposite sex) along with a smattering of French or German – and imposed total suppression of independent intellectual interests, on the principle that ‘bookishness or intellectual confidence diminished a girl’s ...”

“... career had he been born ten years earlier, in 1917. In an eerie bio-bibliography of this tainted self, he provides an oeuvre which runs from the late Expressionist, rhapsodic poetry of his Hitler Youth period, through the post-Stalingrad ‘poetry of lasting significance’, to the ‘fresh start’ mode of de-Nazified 1947. All of which pertains to ...”

“... is rarely stopped by good men alone. It is more often stopped by grave defects of character and of self-awareness: no one else dares tell such criminals what they need to know. Anyone in search of an object lesson in how to write about crime need look no further than Web of Corruption, which tells the story of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith. Raymond Fitzwalter ...”

“... part. To be called upon to defend our University against the attack of Irishmen, to be forced in self-defence to shoot down our countrymen – these are things which even the knowledge of duty well fulfilled cannot render anything but sad and distasteful.’ They remark, too, that while the attitude of many elders in the College may have been sterner, it was ...”

“... by a separate desire, he may well regard at least some of his desires as constitutive of the self he is. If then they are overridden, so is he. The values of science are not just the values of science. Neutrality, even if possible, may not always be desirable. Benevolence, in Runciman’s sense, may seem to some to tip into indifference. Impartiality is ...”

“... inclusion in The Interpretation Frege’s Philosophy of a series of emendations, additions and self-justifications pertaining to Frege: Philosophy of Language. The most remarkable instance of this is in the 11th chapter, ostensibly on Geach’s interpretation of Frege, which begins with a seemingly interminable apology for the way Geach’s views were ...”

“... the literate and the generality (doctors, schoolmasters, clergy, upper-class agitators going down, self-educated proletarians rising, utopian dreamers, militant sansculottes), the breaking-down of class solidarity carrying away ingrained prejudices, the emergence of hidden constants in human nature – Braudel’s ‘mythèmes’ and ‘gustèmes’. One thing ...”

“... concerned with the outside world, like Pepys, or more introspective, like Kafka, will be less self-conscious. He will write down what the paper demands of him and leave it at that, certainly not bothering about the form of it any more than about possible readers. Much of Sassoon’s record is vitiated by his continually seeing himself as a diarist, as ...”

“... most wonderful, the most honourable and the most unexpected manifestation of courage, virtue and self-control the world has ever seen.’ Cavour himself wrote to Durando that ‘the expedition of Garibaldi has turned out to be the most poetic fact of the century and is praised by almost the whole of Europe.’ Even as late as 1896, the cold Boston Brahmin ...”

“... Yet his book, though very personal and, where it chooses, opinionated, seems truly lacking in self-interest, a genuine tribute, sent, with deep respect, from one thousand-word-a-day man, living in exile out of disgust for his beloved country, to another who did the same, more restlessly, more absurdly even, yet not less patriotically. And the homage is ...”

“... money for leukaemia research, there was, as Frank Keating persuasively proves, not an ounce of self-publicism in it. He knew his stunt could raise money, so he performed it – at great physical cost. Everyone quoted in the book comments on the infectious warmth of the man as he made his way south. But then he threw a punch at an interfering traffic ...”

“... St Peter’s, although he had not been responsible for most of the rebuilding. Alexander VII’s self-advertisement appears rather less blatant, but this was due less to his natural diplomacy than to the accident of his dying before he could have the Pantheon redecorated, with his name around the rim of the oculus. He allowed himself to be represented as a ...”

“... informants, and their bloody purges of the work-force, are connected with a larger phenomenon of self-destructive vengeance. Someth May’s use of images such as the Black Lady or the exploding leech is typical of his approach to the problem of how to account for the catastrophe. Sequences of cause and effect, or assignments of blame, are apt to trivialise ...”