“... delight in maintaining that such rules should not be broken, whether by head-butt or injudicious self-revelation. When two thugs intent on kidnap at the very least follow advertising executive Roger Thornhill into a packed lift in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, his mother, who knows what he’s afraid of, but considers him a fantasist, asks them if ...”

“... the Lost Love Letters, love is ‘a certain power of the soul, neither existing through itself nor self-contained, but always pouring itself into another with a kind of appetite and desire, willing to become one with the other so that, from two different wills, one single thing may be produced without difference.’ This sounds like the sort of definition ...”

“... The Ratliff stuff, which teeters between dark comedy and a more sympathetic depiction of redneck self-contempt, seems to belong in a novel by a figure like Barry Hannah, who briefly taught Tartt at the University of Mississippi, though it’s done without Hannah’s flair for loopy satire. Harriet, on the other hand, is decked out with tropes from ...”

“... of popular movements, the mushrooming of democratic organs at the base, and the rise of centres of self-management.’ These movements would work in tandem with the political front, but they would also act as a check on it. Partyism must not override expressions of popular will. Syriza’s leaders have been wary of politicising citizen movements not only ...”

“... ignored him or laughed generously, not taking him seriously. It made him as I recall pompous and self-important. When he was wrong Doris and her friends never corrected him or explained, so he would make wild pronouncements and I was not kind or thoughtful enough to leave them alone at school, where he was with his peers not indulgent socialists. Peter is ...”

“... 1649 and 1689: in each case an unpopular monarch was militarily ousted and the space filled by a self-authorised parliament. But, unlike the court that in 1649 had sentenced James’s father to death for treason against his own people, the politicians of 1689 were nervous about regarding their acts as lawful simply because it was they who were now in ...”

“... had obstructed the peace process was wispy at best; but enough to drive the paranoid president to self-destruction. It transpires​ that Watergate – as The Nixon Tapes show – was not Nixon’s first major cover-up. In December 1971, he and his aides became aware of a concerted domestic espionage programme directed at the White House by his own chiefs of ...”

“... into tribute-paying subjects, the militaristic propaganda of the Funeral Oration and the self-congratulatory civic grandeur of the Parthenon itself. What’s significant about all this, but seldom emphasised, is that the basic evidence, such as it is, has been in plain view all along: Herodotus, Thucydides, Old ...”

“... words but very few deeds. When he assented to the five-year interim arrangements for Palestinian self-governance in the Oslo Accords, Yasser Arafat agreed to exclude Jerusalem from the areas that would be governed pro tempore by the PA. Local leaders, notably the late Faisal Husseini, refused to agree to this, which is one reason Yitzhak Rabin, who ...”

“... the American city or the performance of ego but into travel and nature writing and the negation of self through the practice of Zen Buddhism. By the time Raditzer appeared, Matthiessen had already published Wildlife in America, a study now widely considered a founding document of the modern conservation movement. (Even this had an odd paternal ...”

“... idleness and fecklessness of the black Jamaicans. He was equally scornful about their desire for self-government. A character in Ian McEwan’s novel The Children Act remarks that all of us had beliefs at the age of 17 that would embarrass us now. Vinen found that it was not unusual for ex-national servicemen to be shocked when they reread their diaries and ...”

“... modern representations, with all their unassimilable detritus, into the singularity of supposedly self-evident identities. If we think of The Island Princess’s ‘Moor priest’ as an ‘imam’, we might all too easily finesse the fact – noted by McManus – that he makes pantheistic references to ‘the gods’ and is addressed as ‘Don Governor’, a ...”

“... seething.’ Witch-hunts tempt us to make something from history that never was: the self-congratulatory fables of the philosophes, or the twisted reports of Himmler’s Hexenforschung-Sonderkommando, or Eltingen’s statue of Katharina, or the fictional accounts of her life that either lionise or denigrate her (Arthur Koestler called her a ...”

“... mask and an ‘improvised breechcloth’ to impress a girl called Diana. We learn that he was self-conscious around girls; that he was freckled and bookish and that he hated baked Alaska. Before we can get too close, though, there is another strange uncle or fruity ex-army officer to tell us about (‘I was suspicious of majors who didn’t smoke a ...”

“... to the soul, producing therein … an abundance of happiness, animation, openness, stimulation, self-contentment, generosity and freedom from cares and sorrows … It is wine that provides excellence to society and conversation … and there is nothing that makes possible relations of intimacy and confidence between friends so tastefully and pleasantly and ...”