“... notice in an assembly; he tended to mumble in a thick accent; and he was wary of strangers. The self-effacing are, of course, perfectly entitled to efface themselves, but MacLean tended to denigrate himself as well. Could he possibly be worth all that money? According to Webster, he would protest: ‘I’m no good but one day I’ll write a good book.’ At ...”

“... these are seen as tainted documents, recording what the inquisitors wanted their victims to say in self-denunciation – a view that would disqualify a sizeable amount of what has been written on later medieval Europe, including such classics as Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou. As befits a writer who has always identified the Jews with peoplehood rather than ...”

“... failing which it may require reforms normally associated with the language of state retreat – self-governing hospitals, opted-out schools, co-operative pension schemes, lower levels of income tax. But it won’t work if these continue to be described as a means of escape from the state. The only real escape would come with the freedom to choose how ...”

“... alas, as demanding) as Dante’s – he could seem irritatingly frivolous, irresponsible, self-regarding in his off-the-cuffremarks. ‘And what a cuff!’ one is tempted to add, all stiff with brocade. Early on, the poet and critic Richard Howard stigmatised him as a bejewelled poet, and that characterisation stuck, though it suited only his earliest ...”

“... court’. Why Pepys risked being stood in the pillory, or having his nose slit, by keeping such a self-incriminating archive is hard to fathom, and it inevitably raises the question of why he needed to keep a diary in the first place. Was it an exercise in sheer vanity? Was it the compulsion of a born record-keeper? Was it a bid for posthumous fame? Was it ...”

“... account as the most obviously successful exemplar of fundamentalist polygyny. ‘Tall, handsome, self-assured, intelligent and articulate’, Harry manages his five wives, 65 children and over three hundred members of subsequent generations with a seemingly invariable mixture of sensitivity and firmness. Known to the entire family, including himself, as ...”

“... clung to the bars and studiously ignored the men behind them. They conversed in low voices, but self-consciously. They knew perfectly well that every man in the cell was looking at them, mentally undressing them, even weighing up their chances, as perhaps the desk sergeant was encouraging them to do. It didn’t matter that they tried to keep still, as ...”

“... of the window – is hard against the edge of the canvas. In Nude in the Bath of 1924 a sliver of self-portrait (foot, dressing-gown, hands – perhaps sketching) breaks the upper-left-hand edge. Most perversely, by all ordinary conventions of composition, figures and faces (or parts of them) appear in these borderlands. In The White Tablecloth (1926) a scrap ...”

“... become uniquely different from us’. There is something endearingly American about this credo of self-creation; Wright continues: ‘We struggle through experience to build our character. Our task is to make ourselves unique … We become the people we choose to be; this is the premise of free will.’ This interpretation would probably not be shared by most ...”

“... Where Hegel makes our heads spin with his symphonic portrayals of the shifting configurations of a self-propelling dialectic, and Heidegger dizzies us with his hermeneutic shuttle between different origins of existence, Fernández-Armesto keeps us firmly on familiar ground, regaling us with curious anecdotes, and reassuring us with simple philosophical ...”

“... as fantasy. Jonathan Haslam, arguing about whether the Cold War was inevitable, writes as a self-confessed sceptic about the value of such questions. ‘One dubious instance,’ he suggests, ‘is where the historian arbitrarily selects a single favourite variable, alters its weight or true composition, but holds all other variables from the same ...”

“... of 1930-2 did he learn how to touch the heart as well as to shock and show off. The process of self-education went right on up to the great chapel at Ronchamp. That would be consonant with the picture which Brooks draws. What is clear from this Bildungsroman is that Le Corbusier’s point of departure in 1920 owes everything to a very slow and often ...”

“... learn all the wrong lessons – essentially that they can get away with almost any amount of self-indulgent behaviour and still win. Victories create a new set of myths – in the current case that Labour owes everything to Blair and the new yuppie style. Actually, Labour would have won crushingly under Cook or Brown in 1997. And, of course, whatever the ...”

“... a sharp decline in the number of employers, down by a good third in the period. The ranks of the self-employed were artificially inflated by large numbers of unemployed trying their hand, often briefly, at shopkeeping and of smallholders with no more than a patch of land who were classified as farmers. Yet the really fundamental change was that, more and ...”

“... than the Royal Ballet. To its admirers, the company represents dedication, rigour, sublimation of self and respect for tradition. There are few more exuberantly beautiful spectacles than its dancers in flight. They describe their sense of comradeship, the joy they take in their work, the ideals they share. But as directors, administrators and board members ...”