“... and ‘lesbo-Victorian’ are all terms Waters herself has used in self-description – though generally not all of them at once – and they are both accurate enough and unfair. The books are indeed pastiches: Victoriana as a queer theorist might perform it, with costumes by Judith Butler, prisons and madhouses by ...”

“... had employed ‘pride and ego down’, military argot for a technique intended to cause a loss of self-respect in the detainee; in this case, to bring a high-ranking officer ‘down a peg or two’, as Welshofer put it. In front of several hundred Iraqi detainees, Welshofer testified, he had forced Mowhoush to his knees and slapped him. Mowhoush had then ...”

“... thugs and killers maintain order throughout the nation. Of course they are protected by people’s self-censorship, by the killing of journalists (historically, in this respect, Colombia ranks highest or second highest in the world), and the endless confusion of rumour such an anxious society produces, with the encouragement of the media and the government. It ...”

“... had been abused, had fallen in love with her abuser, but experienced feelings of guilt and self-loathing which not only prevented the consummation of her love for others (hence the Virgin Queen) but enforced celibacy on her favourites and ladies-in-waiting. Theology, speaking a language which Elizabeth herself could have understood, would have ...”

“... south-west United States, expensive houses abundantly equipped with solar panels to offer energy self-sufficiency, or near enough, were much in demand in the 1970s – there was even something of a boom in cave-houses, luxurious villas semi-submerged in the ground for better insulation in both winter and summer. It was the same in industry. After 1973, much ...”

“... one Gilbert can’t teach her. If you are to be liked, you have to be like other people, not self-willed; you have to be analogous, to be interchangeable with Fi Hammond or Dido. Catrine won’t have it; to her father she complains: ‘I want to have character I don’t want to be compromised.’ Her interlocutor in the gallery has it wrong: it’s lack ...”

“... is apparent from the portraits of the favourites, here investigated by Jonathan Brown, icons of self-projection which may be indicative of insecurity and precariousness of defined status as much as of power. For the nominalist, it will be significant that the very word ‘favourite’ originated in this period. Blair Worden’s brilliant and wide-ranging ...”

“... for example, bona fide beauty queens racing naked for a prize Ferrari. Escobar was of course more self-indulgent than the average DEA agent, and certainly had more fun than any one hundred of them, but he spent very much more than a Ferrari’s worth building public housing for Medellín’s poor, and was even more Napoleonic in his business affairs. It was ...”

“... to wishful thinking. Kennedy’s response to the Civil Rights movement was ‘largely motivated by self-serving political considerations’, Dallek writes. Unlike his primary opponent Hubert Humphrey, a hero of the Civil Rights movement, or his running mate, Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy didn’t really care about Civil Rights. In his campaign he tried to please ...”

“... knee-breeches, whom I admired for the way he stood between the arrogant victors and the self-pitying vanquished. Skin softened around his eyes as he listened to the eternal denial. Ich bin niemals im Partei gewesen. I formed a real friendship with a couple named Schmidt, who had been bombed out of Hamburg. He had been a lawyer, she was the ...”

“... be tempted to aspirate it out of the deference accorded to rank. Having worked her way along the self-help shelf, Mugglestone goes for evidence of a more relaxed but equally instructive kind to the novelists, or those of them who choose to represent variations in pronunciation or usage orthographically, the more recognisably to bring out the differences ...”

“... many Bloomsbury figures, he had practically no friends. He worked with extraordinary intensity and self-discipline, producing books, essays and translations of the highest quality, but he was always poor. Contemporaries remembered how badly dressed he was, in a threadbare, tweedy way. And all, almost without exception, remembered his dreadful teeth. Leonard ...”

“... more admired than the poem itself, which nevertheless is superior to them. Even the frighteningly self-absorbed stony old man of the famous frontispiece is not really adequate to Blake’s magnificent conception.’ I want immediately to quarrel with the judgment, and in any case to say that extracting the frontispiece from the overall texture of images in ...”

“... libraries and archives; their unique systems of tutorial teaching, collegiate organisation and self-government; and the academic prestige accumulated by two dozen generations of scholars, philosophers, scientists, poets and prime ministers. Their competitors cannot produce these things at any price, much less one that undercuts theirs. And because the ...”

“... de Florentia’). The unusually youthful features of St Luke have been canvassed as an early self-portrait. For the next 15 years, until his early death in 1457, he worked like a fury, mostly in Florence and mostly in fresco, producing a series of dramatic masterpieces of which only a fraction survive, among them the grave and melancholy Last Supper in ...”