“... that is true of all lotteries everywhere, including our own. Without superstition, without self-delusion, they are nothing. All the choices we make in relation to the Lottery – the decision to play each week, the amount we spend each week, the numbers we choose each week – are attempts to unravel fate, to find the key to a particular kind of ...”

“... could he turned into a sacred space, a secular shrine. We catch a whiff here of the high-minded self-indulgence of today’s avant-garde ‘installations’. Most of the radical ideas about framing in the last decades of the 19th century which are documented in this book were conceived by artists, and chiefly, often exclusively, with reference to the needs ...”

“... activity, it is not easy to unravel the mutually-reinforcing motives of selflessness and self-interest, and Prochaska does not try to do so. All that can safely be said is that most members of the royal family have difficulty distinguishing between concern about society, concern about the social order and concern about what best to do so they can ...”

“... a farewell letter to Bernier written shortly afterwards, she enjoined him to ‘refuse to accept self-doubt ... A human being cannot doubt himself when he is following his own path. If he doubts, if he lowers his head, it’s because an element foreign to strength, to his strength to be spontaneously is pulling him backward ... Why do human beings refuse to ...”

“... Pincus’s picture of an animated political community is in one sense a reaction against the self-styled revisionism of recent decades, which has had more to say about consensus than about conflict, more about intrigue than about issues. His version, where beliefs and passions count for almost everything, makes it much easier to understand why men took ...”

“... of natural living, in respect of their families, their food, their homes and their numbers, are self-defeating as well as abhorrent. The Youngs’ farm in Worcestershire does well enough, although they are in debt and have had to accept a subsidy for turning cereal fields to grass, against their wish and instinct to keep their farming as mixed as ...”

“... at all – that Shapin tells so incisively. If no one now takes seriously T. S. Eliot’s entirely self-promoting notion of a dissociation of sensibility that supposedly took place in the 17th century, it is generally acknowledged that something more momentous – less literary – than sensibilities did change in that period, a period of astonishing cultural ...”

“... pilgrimage. There is no doubt that this is 12th, not seventh-century work: apart from the obvious self-interest, no real Anglo-Saxon would have put a masculine singular definite article in front of a plural noun (‘se muneces’), nor produced the strange conflation of singular and plural, nominative/accusative and dative, seen in ‘to pa munecan ...”

“... Widmerpool. The man named is – notwithstanding Lord Longford’s highly Widmerpoolian attempt at self-identification – one Denis Capel-Dunn, a wartime Cabinet Office official described but not named in Faces in My Time, the third volume of Powell’s memoirs (where he goes by the nickname The Papal Bun). There is also a hint, or at least a non-denial, that ...”

“... when he plays down its connections with the present. What most historians need is more, not less, self-awareness about the political pressures which determine the topics they choose to research. Certainly, the subject which is at once too blandly and too provocatively called ‘British history’ was generated by political circumstance. J.G.A. Pocock ...”

“... evils, though his equal commitment to the sanctity of property made him critical of London’s self-interested incitement of Southern slave rebellion. Moreover, in regard to India as to America, Burke took the fact of British imperium absolutely for granted: ‘there we are placed by the Sovereign Disposer.’ As Frederick Whelan remarks, what concerned ...”

“... Horne took over the Bulletin in 1961, he killed off the slogan ‘Australia for the White Man.’ Self-assurance was, and remains, his strong suit. Horne’s writing about Australian cultural history and current affairs is a cut above journalism in a country whose journalism, at its best, has always had the virtue of being willing to get above itself. The ...”

“... There is a painful irony in the fact that the poet’s mental anguish overcame what vestiges of self-control he still retained on one of the most grandiose of late Augustan musical and literary occasions. In February and March 1779 three much-publicised performances took place in London of an elaborate musical setting of Horace’s Carmen Seculare. This ...”

“... one central reason. It exposes both its main subject and her royal catch, not as the dim-witted, self-obsessed lovers who have been pickled for posterity, but as nasty, determined Fascists who wanted to preside over a ‘new social order’ which would do away for ever with all pretence at democracy and consign all opposition to the ...”

“... Surrealism, characteristically blended with pseudo-archaic proverbial sagacity, fails to disguise self-pity. In life, he said, one throws a ball and hopes that one’s friends will form a wall that enables it to return: but it usually falls, as if it had hit a wet sheet. Huffington, concerned to help us to understand the deterioration of Picasso’s relations ...”