“... produce poets. Howe’s New England is a crucible of philosophy and theodicy, ambition and self-coruscation and frugality. One need look no further than the arresting juxtaposition of epigraphs with which she begins The Birth-Mark (1993), her critical study of early American literature. A passage from Hawthorne’s short story about facial ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Algeria diminished rather than enhanced French power, he became instead a resolute advocate of self-determination – putting down a coup attempt by the army and surviving assassination attempts by supporters of French Algeria – and accepted independence in 1962. He went on to try to reinvent French greatness yet again, by conducting an autonomous global ...”

“... night – takes its shape and tone from standard accounts of the A6 murder, the first case in any self-respecting compilation. In The Penguin Encyclopedia of Crime, Oliver Cyriax comments that ‘thirty years ago, it seemed inconceivable that a Briton might hang for a crime he was tied to by almost no evidence.’ Now we have no such misconceptions. Railways ...”

“... a bad father, or a believing wife from an unbelieving husband. Age was superior to youth, and ‘self conceyted young men’ a constant menace. ‘The greatest number of Papists’ were ‘very yonge men’ and the most contentious Puritans were ‘for the most parte … men of yong yeeres & superficiall vnderstanding’. As for the common people, they were ...”

“... Irrationally but unmanageably outraged. This is very important to me, I replied to my reasoning self, but I was unable to explain why.The Arctic would have been easier, but I had no desire to head North. I wanted white and ice as far as the eye could see, and I wanted it in the one place in the world which was uninhabited. I wanted my white bedroom extended ...”

“... a security firm, with a website offering the chance to go on the ‘ultimate jihad challenge’, a self-defence training course in America. The offer was only ever taken up by one person, a security guard from Sainsbury’s. Sulayman attracted the attention of Special Branch and MI5, who made several attempts to recruit him as an agent. After 11 September the ...”

“... and how the failings of Italy’s transport infrastructure encouraged the creation of more self-sufficient steel mini-mills. Britain’s relative decline has been the subject of hundreds if not thousands of books. Perhaps it should be no surprise that the analysis here is often both familiar and at first glance deeply depressing. The examples cited of ...”

“... Music Master, George (later Sir George) Dyson. ‘One hates talking (I know it’s only silly shy self-consciousness) about anything one really feels,’ he added, to explain why he hadn’t mentioned it before: ‘These things go much better into ink.’ Having won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, he removed himself to Schwerin, in ...”

“... hard-working. But she was too short, her legs were too thick, and she was perhaps too brittle and self-conscious to lose herself in a role. Then, on 15 November 1949, bitterly aware that she would never be anything more than ‘a crumb on the banquet table of MGM’, Nancy Davis wangled a date with Ronald Wilson Reagan. For more than two years, however, the ...”

“... parents, whether or not they were competent logicians, have been able to recognise a reductive, self-serving argument when they saw it. The logical mistake in arguments of this kind lies in the fact that breaking down a particular conceptual distinction between A and B is not the same thing as showing that there are no differences between them. The most ...”

“... friends, showing them too clearly, one would have thought, what he expected from them, and his own self-absorption. Marie Nordlinger, a serious and scholarly girl who had given him a lot of help with Ruskin, is treated with a patronising gallantry which must have upset her. ‘I am all on fire for Sesame – and for you’ is not quite the right phrasing for ...”

“... The timing of opinions is a strong indication that not much factual support is needed for national self-congratulation, and now we are presented in R.A. Houston’s work with a numerical analysis which sets out to show that there was nothing very special in the level of 18th-century Scottish literacy. Houston has collected figures of those able to sign from ...”

“... be us when I’ve got this done.’ How, when the blurred and blurring language of Catherine’s self-justification speaks for betrayal, can it continue to contain hope or promise of happiness? So profound is the break that we are given an unprecedented view of Catherine through her own eyes, gazing desperately at her image in the mirror. David returns to ...”

“... and bathos. The best guide for the perplexed is to be found in Monty Python’s sketch about the self-made Yorkshire businessmen all loafing around and vying with each other over the hardships of their upbringing. Meacher, in a tussle for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party, gave the impression that his father had been a farm worker. He succeeded in ...”