“... The dramatic story of the rise and fall of the self-proclaimed messiah Sabbatai Sevi has usually been presented as a weird anomaly in Jewish history, with no redeeming merit as a lesson. However, as more and more becomes known about it, the case becomes of greater, and more general interest. Sabbatai Sevi was born in 1626, the son of a Jewish assistant to the Dutch, English and French merchants then living in Smyrna (now Izmir ...”

“... comprehensiveness. They kept children out of the state sector and deprived it of a powerful and self-confident vested interest: the parents of those who go to public schools. Old Labour never had the courage to touch the independent schools even when it might have done so. Now it couldn’t be done anyway since human rights legislation and EU law probably ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... too difficult for those who participated. Sometimes they collapsed into violent confusion and self-contradiction. But in the PAIGC and its companion movements in Angola and Mozambique lapses were exceptional. Those who persisted had to have driven themselves through formidable barriers of discouragement, insisting on disciplined tactics at the expense of ...”

“... a therapy that suited his conception of the doctor’s role – to augment the patient’s natural self-healing. Indians, he declared, responded particularly well simply because they were closer to nature than Europeans. But his influence began to decline. The obvious reason was the rise of chemical anaesthetics; Winter implies that racial anxieties also ...”

“... who reported this rule having his leg pulled? Those rich thrusters of the Grande Epoque, the self-made men destined to become the new ruling class, come in for expert dissection in The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches by Mordaunt Crook, who is primarily concerned with their architectural tastes. Here we meet not only the men whose millions came from ...”

“... husk of him who sang will soon/be powdered glass underfoot.’ Here, as Galassi observes, the self-identification is even more explicit. The cicada for Montale has something of that Yeatsian place ‘where all the ladders stop and start’, as the key-word foce (‘estuary’, ‘outlet’) in the last stanza of the sistrum poem suggests. There ...”

“... exhibited cards with coloured symbols on them, surrounded by interpretative texts based on his own self-made hermeneutic system, creating a symbolic iconography, an ever-expanding text. In many of the documentary films and videos there was a similar tendency, with emphasis on the gap between what happened and what is recorded – the contradictory and ...”

“... On closer enquiry he improves. Shrewd judgment and even humility coexisted alongside a habit of self-justification and a mania for work. ‘No time today!’ Sir Gilbert would cry as he swept out of his office to the next appointment, brushing assistants aside. There cannot have been much intimacy for the boy. Though he grew up in awe of his father, he came ...”

“... Britain gave his brother eastern Palestine and called it the Emirate of Transjordan. Cox’s self-deception was perhaps deeper than that of his faithful handmaid, Miss Bell. Even by 1927, he did not understand why the Iraqis had rejected British rule. Writing that it was ‘extraordinary’, he added: ‘The mere terms “mandatory” and ...”

“... chorus of celebrants here isn’t background – the passengers are strangers, not part of their self-defining past – and they aren’t scenery. They are a necessary part of the romantic comedy, a backdrop that does more than concentrate the attention: they help legitimise what’s going on downstage. Elsewhere, scenery threatens to intrude; but when it ...”

“... another moment, his last in fact, the dying man is hopeful, as he calls out to a former artistic self who is also, always, a future one in the making: ‘that Youth who could do ...”

“... face fell. He’d wanted the Nobel Peace Prize.’ He ran the Government in a wholly self-indulgent manner, and had little idea about peacetime problems, saying, for example, of his time as Chancellor under Baldwin: ‘I was Chancellor of the Exchequer . . . for five years and . . . I never understood it.’ Not long before leaving office he ...”

“... versions of Newton’s divine dinner, poured from the London presses into the coffee houses. Self-made experts announced that the Principia had tamed comets and tides, planets and pendulums by celestial law and geometrical order. However surprising it may seem, even the English title, ‘The Mathematical Principles of Natural ...”

“... Bower has missed it, or Branson is that shallow: a rich man who is of no interest at all. That the self-aggrandising prankster who races to court at every opportunity and continually complains of being done down is lacking substance isn’t news, but still it’s disappointing to find that there is nothing more to him than one thought. It’s evident that ...”