“... in Western European countries. And I’m only talking about Kultur here, not mass murder. The self-appointed members of the master race made themselves at home by turning Polish palaces into beer halls – often after stuffing their pockets with treasure. Governor-General Hans Frank toured the ruins of the Royal Palace in Warsaw and casually tore silver ...”

“... anxiety not to give offence developed early. In his autobiography Without Stopping (1972) – a self-portrait so unrevealing that William Burroughs renamed it Without Telling – Bowles describes some of the ruses and deceits he evolved so as to avoid the wrath of his near-psychotic father, Claude Bowles, whose methods of child-rearing seem to have derived ...”

“... no colour lines in music’; it expressed doubts about integrated big bands, and did not exclude a self-righteous belief in American superiority, and hostility to ‘un-American ideals’, pursued by ‘groups of unassimilated peoples here ... breeding hates among themselves and disrespect for American institutions’ – i.e. Nazis and ...”

“... we are surely bound to find the Epicureans too rationalistic, the Sceptics too procedurally self-obsessed, the Stoics (at least in their Roman incarnation) too unyieldingly pompous for us to take entirely seriously, not just their therapies, but the idea of them as philosophical therapists. Nussbaum indeed alleviates the formal implications of their use ...”

“... he did so both discreetly and discretely, his first-person je left teasingly intermediate between self-reference and a merely grammatical subjectivity, so that we have only intuition to go on in deciding how many autobiographemes there might be in that book. Given how extraordinarily well it sold – 80,000 copies in the first year is the figure Calvet gives ...”

“... with tractors and hammers and sickles. Aids has encouraged makers in genres which privilege wilful self-absorption to do something similar. Sometimes this works, but a lot of the art in Don’t Leave Me This Way fails. Describe these pieces, look to the descriptions for meanings, and pretty often you get messages of painful banality: Gay Beauty Myth (collage ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... one might think to occultism and theosophy – Eastern religion, Vedanta, the Tarot pack, mystical self-abasement. As Butler notes, the early Modernism which excited London between 1910 and 1915 made an accommodation with ‘classicising and tradition-conscious’ English culture after the war. Only Woolf produced novels which went beyond her early ...”

“... might wonder ‘whether, notwithstanding impassioned aims, paeans of progress, endless pageants of self-illusions’, humanity’s ‘capacity of degeneration did not equal, and might some day exceed, its capacity of development’. The telling of this melancholy story is not helped by the book’s joint authorship: some relevant facts are rehearsed several ...”

“... Wokulski, an intelligent and sensitive man, is aware of his predicament and given to tortured self-analysis. Nor does he lack colleagues and friends to tell him what to do. Will he ever act on his realisation that he would have had no difficulty in rejecting his beloved if he had known her better? Though it centres on a single obsessive relationship, this ...”

“... My scoffs were absolutely at a discount. And then I read a memorial interview with that old self-server and mass-murderer Robert McNamara. He recalled an occasion, quite early in the Lyndon Johnson presidency, when Jackie had come up to him at a reception in New York and beaten her fists on his chest, calling on him to stop the killing in Vietnam. Of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”