“... of 1399 wrought in Henry a ‘deep change of character’; or was he merely revealing his true self? And how did the experience colour his outlook and actions as king? Henry’s story cannot be told without addressing these questions. Mortimer’s account of Henry’s upbringing and early career is full and perceptive. His father ensured that he knew the ...”

“... and could be adopted by those who take much more traditional approaches to questions of the self and the mind. In fact, Sellars’s own endorsement of mind-body identity owes little to his inferentialism; its motivation lies rather in a quite orthodox conception of the authority of science, as well as a refusal to deny the reality of the mental. He may ...”

“... cultural stereotype’: that of the pious female martyr, the embodiment of feminine self-sacrifice. The most powerful example in Britain was Edith Cavell, whose execution by the German authorities in 1915 for running a refugee smuggling network out of her nurses’ training school was useful propaganda for the Allies. British newspapers, which ...”

“... in the following lines from ‘No hay olvido’, and they are not locked in a room of the self. On the contrary, there is a great deal of tenderness towards others, and if the phrase about wanting to forget clearly glances at the poem’s title and implies a stark impossibility, the very form of the sentence reminds us discreetly that the thing can ...”

“... denied in the Soviet Union then, and still is in Europe today. If anything, the Russian self-image was even more high-cultural than that of the majority of Western European countries. The futile attempt to control or even to ban jazz and rock’n’roll in the Soviet Union is evidence of that. For the Americans, high culture, not just Modernism, was ...”

“... for Japan simultaneously because the Japanese language doesn’t set up a strict boundary between Self and Other – a claim that doesn’t impress the hard-nosed Tsutsui.) Tsutsui gives this kind of stuff ample space, but – being both a fan and an academic writing for a mass audience – he’s terrified of sounding too serious. In a doomed effort to make ...”

“... by social justice. The virtuous circle is one in which long-term economic and political gains are self-sustaining, because confidence on both fronts becomes mutually reinforcing. The problem all along was how to get there from here, when here meant that Labour was so distrusted that it would never be allowed the economic latitude to fulfil its political ...”

“... and paradoxes run rampant as she describes the convoluted nature of her tale: ‘deception and self-deception . . . blurring of truth and reality . . . secrets and lies. Yet it also contains generosity, goodwill, absurdity, laughter, tenderness and a good measure of love.’ At which point, overloaded by the blinding chiaroscuro of it all, I think: dear ...”

“... an account of Herbert Hart’s life that reflects her desire to see the mask of respectability and self-possession torn off, so that people will know what she had to cope with. Hart seems to have used the diaries partly as a substitute for intimacy, but perhaps he left them for Jenifer on purpose. These days, unfortunately, a biographer presented with such ...”

“... has too often found itself of late. Kitsch is, among other things, an unknowing complicity in self-limitation. Updike does not mean to condescend, of course; but in striving to find good ‘literary’ words, like ‘tender’ and ‘poignant’, he both inflates and deflates language, almost as if he were condescending to himself. Updike’s prose has ...”

“... that he was setting himself against a veritable trahison des clercs, which had undermined the self-confidence of generations of students, teaching them to be ashamed of a social order and a capitalism described in negative terms, a damaging Marxist present-centredness distorting the past. For Elton, the most troublesome of those turbulent priests was the ...”

“... precise in address. Desire is not only registered in products today, it is anticipated there: a self-interpellation of ‘hey, that’s me’ greets the consumer in catalogues and on-line. This perpetual personalising of the commodity is one factor that drives the inflation of design. What happens when this commodity machine – now conveniently located out ...”

“... western islands and to make plays out of what he found there. One of the triumvirate which ran the self-consciously culturally-nationalist Abbey Theatre (the others were Yeats and Augusta Gregory), Synge completed five plays between 1902 and 1909, when he died from Hodgkin’s disease. Despite his metropolitan upbringing and Protestant heritage, all of his ...”

“... to the naturalism of Vermeer and Caravaggio and ultimately to the Arnolfini Marriage with its self-proclaimed evidential status (Johannes de eyck fuit hic, 1434), the claim that we are witnessing a record of transmitted light has always catered to this impulse. Whether we actually are witnessing a direct transcription and what kind of editing has occurred ...”

“... that he would be willing to compromise on the issue of independence provided Beijing allowed Tibet self-governance: a one-country, two-systems arrangement, as in Hong Kong. Beijing will have none of it. One option for the Tibetans is to be patient, and hope that the CCP crumbles before they do. They might have time on their side: the Dalai Lama’s personal ...”