“... obfuscating misbeliefs which can only be shown up and corrected by a knowledge of the past. This self-deception about the history of the family has particularly affected Western Europeans. Frenchmen, Germans or Englishmen, unless they have come across the work of recent historical sociologists, are likely to believe the following. That the co-resident ...”

“... and what Leslie Fiedler calls in his recent book on freaks ‘myths and images of the secret self’. None of these phenomena except possibly the last, however, can explain the fascination which the Elephant Man had for the working-class patrons of the show in the Whitechapel Road, or the social celebrities who flocked to drink tea with Merrick in his ...”

“... the Middle Ages were still going strong in 1789. Serfdom, patrimonial jurisdiction, the economic self-sufficiency of the estate centred on the great house were still realities determining the whole tone of society over huge tracts of Eastern and Central Europe. Even in what we have learned carelessly to call ‘advanced’ countries (the adjective itself is ...”

“... the Survey of London began life as one of those ventures in historical preservation and national self-regard which burgeoned in the 1890s and 1900s, and included the National Trust, Country Life, the Burlington Magazine, the Victoria County History, the Dictionary of National Biography and the Historical Monuments Commission. All were concerned with ...”

“... below the rank of gentleman were few indeed, though some – like Sir William Petty – were self-made. ‘Those of high rank’ tended to monopolise discussions, which accordingly often became ‘trivial’. Many ‘serious scientists’ ceased to attend. Sprat’s History of the Royal Society was a propagandist document, which attempted – whilst ...”

“... Gunn to the National Library of Scotland in 1971. But the letters seem unencumbered by writerly self-consciousness. Gunn and Shepherd didn’t meet often – Andrews notes that ‘their friendship exists mostly in their letters’ – but over more than forty years they developed a rare kind of ease. Shepherd addresses him as ‘Neil me lad’. He tells her ...”

“... in Britain for much of the 1920s and 1930s. For Keynes, this was proof that the economy was not a self-correcting machine: when unemployment was high, governments must use fiscal and monetary policy to increase aggregate demand, kickstarting the deployment of resources lying idle. But Keynes also saw the effects of hyperinflation in Weimar Germany. Far from ...”

“... Catholicism – or anything that looked like it – was not fully appreciated by James, and his self-curated role as Rex Pacificus was seen, by an increasingly Puritan Parliament, as unheroic, even iniquitous. Buckingham shifted his loyalties towards Charles, and away from peace towards war. He was, by this point, the country’s leading politician, on a ...”

“... Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, puts it, under Trump the US acts ‘in the same narrowly self-interested, frequently exploitative way as many great powers throughout history’. Trump is not an isolationist, to the extent the term has any useful meaning, and does not propose a withdrawal from world power. On the contrary, Brands writes, on some ...”

“... was German. But Patrik, who won’t be restricted by nationality, won’t accept Celan’s self-characterisation either. ‘Celan was writing in the middle of the world of multilingualism. In my opinion, he didn’t just translate, he sang in his translations. He sang in Romanian, Russian, French, Hebrew and English until he had no voice left.’ In ...”

“... goal my whole life: to become an Icelandic writer.’The reader is made aware of opinionatedness, self-confidence, indomitability, mercuriality, application, aggression. Qualities not attractive in themselves, and often put to the service of poorer ends. Guðmundsson frequently mentions Laxness’s charm. He asked a lot of his mother, his wives and his ...”

“... not discern [them] from Inglish men’. Exile, voluntary or otherwise, provided opportunities for self-reinvention. Leonard Ragapo, who came to England with Raleigh, became a society celebrity and generous host, ‘not after the ordinarie rude manner of the Indians’, according to the adventurer Robert Harcourt, ‘but in a more civill fashion, and with much ...”

“... and British establishments, during his detention as well as his dictatorship, Schweitzer’s self-consciously civilised manner and superficially reasonable arguments about Chile’s right to govern itself were distractions from the electrocutions and ejections from helicopters in which the Pinochet regime specialised. Sands’s admission that he was a ...”

“... wealth with the remark: ‘It is extremely difficult for the best of Men to divest themselves of Self-Interest.’ Indeed, the foundations for Connecticut Hall, the oldest surviving building on Yale’s campus, were laid in 1750 by a team of free and enslaved workers. The anti-slavery movement took encouragement from the American Revolution. In New ...”

“... from the start. Rereading the novel, I kept thinking about Mickey’s transformation from naif to self-actualised cynic in The Switch and wished that Jackie had been given room to grow. The early scene in which Jackie resists Ordell is particularly telling. We’ve already seen Ordell post bond for someone he wants to silence. We know what’s meant to ...”