“... man; as the first secular Jew, or secularist tout court; as the first political Zionist; as a self-hating Jew; as a quasi-Buddhist; as an early feminist. All of these have been proposed. Which is right? Many new possibilities of deciding that question now exist, based on our much greater knowledge of the Jewish community of the Netherlands and Dutch ...”

“... Where did their freedom of movement, their composure come from? What consequences did their self-sufficiency have? Men stared and remarked and observed: women tried to look down and away and sideways. Women were among the sights that flâneurs took in as they slid through the crowds on the streets, but to look boldly in return was to designate oneself a ...”

“... its secrecy? On an expedition to a nearby tourist island to buy rice for the camp, Richard is self-righteously disgusted by the loudness and sloppiness of those who inhabit ‘the World’. Then, just before sailing back, he comes across the body of a recently dead junkie, lying beside his sleeping girlfriend. In order to save her from the shock of ...”

“... which is less accomplished but possesses much of the same drive and power. Always a stringent self-critic, he considered it unfinished, and it was not published until 1978, 21 years after his death. It deals with the Civil War and with his imprisonment, a period that saw the end of O’Malley’s career as an active revolutionary. His politics remained ...”

“... seat prices went through the roof. For a short time the books were balanced. But the upswing in self-generated income was taken by the Government as reason to reduce public funding further. The recession of the late 1980s took its toll of the private sponsors. The House began to falter just as Isaacs’s more adventurous repertory came on stream. Tooley ...”

“... Languet. In Richard McCoy’s Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (1979), the conflict between self-assertion and submission is made the leitmotiv of the whole life, a story of ‘guilt, ambivalence and ideological confusion’. Stewart discusses Sir Robert Sidney’s letter as if Freud had never been, but with a good sense that Sidney père wrote within a ...”

“... who was always in the Patients’ Club was a musician. I envied him his supply of small talk, his self-deprecating charm, and I tried to overhear his conversations, surrounded as I was by my enormous silence. One day he disappeared from the ward and when he came back, he was pale and utterly washed out. It was not too difficult to save up those pills that ...”

“... urban pleasure: Alfred de Musset, in imitation of De Quincey, described flânerie as a process of self-detachment, in which the subject gives himself up to the ‘spectacle du moment’: ‘J’ai flâné dans les rues: j’ai marché devant moi, libre, bayant aux grues’ (‘I strolled around, I walked ahead of myself, free, gaping at the whores’). Sadler ...”

“... or Late Night with Conan O’Brien, defensively folding his arms across his chest and making self-deprecating jokes about his weight to an audience of young yahoos who never knew the slim him and have the attention span of fleas. The portly, senatorial Vidal who does cameo appearances in cinematic claptrap such as Bob Roberts and With Honours (where his ...”

“... 1975, he was hanged in Port of Spain’s Royal Jail. Michael X was a huckster, an opportunistic self-shaper who managed to maximise the returns on his racial background. Like every con-man’s story, his is fascinating and it’s a pity that Windrush does not feature more like it. It’s also noticeable that while the authors are given to romanticising ...”

“... that of the man with his doll and his box. But a name is always a role for Borges, an idea of the self, and the interplay between actor and part takes many forms in his writing. In one of his early prose works, The Universal History of Infamy (1935), Borges says of Billy the Kid that he ‘never fully measured up to the legend of himself, but he came closer ...”

“... former more an emotional attachment, the latter involving both political allegiance and economic self-interest. More recently, the pattern has shifted: identification with Scotland has grown in intensity, while the tie to England has assumed an emotive dimension. In general, the elderly and the Protestant tend to have stronger feelings of Britishness than ...”

“... that is invulnerable to criticism and irony; but that it is the work of a distinctive, gifted, self-conscious “author” is never in doubt.’ It has never been in doubt, so the assertion is ...”

“... debris of three generations. In August Archie and Rosalind arrived. Archie seemed unlike his usual self: pressed, he admitted that he had fallen in love with his golf partner, Miss Nancy Neele. An impossible three months followed. Archie blew hot and cold, moving from his London club to Styles, and then back to the club. Agatha’s only friend was her ...”

“... disagreed about their first principles, but that moral philosophers based their arguments on self-evident truths. (An unclerical example is Sir William Temple, in his essay on Epicurus.) It was also commonly agreed that few men bowed voluntarily to the constraints of morality; nearly all had to be driven into it by supernatural warnings. Objectors, like ...”