“... own sanity,’ Edith Walton said in the New York Times Book Review. Inverted clichés come to seem self-evidently true; rich people, for instance, ‘want to be liked for their money too, and not only for themselves’. Characters give extremely explicit accounts of their own qualities and motives, which then often seem to have no connection with their actual ...”

“... attached to them, that always most occupies her, and she’s hard on herself, relentlessly self-critical, from the outset: ‘This story seems to me to lack coherence and sharpness,’ she writes of the unpublished ‘Rose Eagle’, really no more than a draft, in 1913. ‘It’s like eating a bunch of grapes instead of caviar … I have a pretty bad ...”

“... the sake of the country’ was over, the volunteers went back to their books or banks in a haze of self-congratulation, surely agreeing with the newspaper that proclaimed: ‘Truly, we are an amazing people.’ There is at once something admirable and terrible about the mindset revealed in this episode. On the one hand, volunteers showed a level of ...”

“... high vocation. Both do justice to his enormous talents, and both draw attention to the excessive self-confidence that led him at times to overestimate his own prowess as a negotiator, though Ventresca also stresses Pacelli’s contrasting proneness to bouts of chronic indecision. Both believe him to have been a great pope, while recognising that his choice ...”

“... which usually changed considerably over time. Many of the early little magazines, far from being self-consciously ‘modernist’, were antiquarian throwbacks. Fin-de-siècle periodicals like the Yellow Book, the Chameleon and the Savoy took inspiration from William Morris, Charles Ricketts and other luminaries of the Arts and Crafts movement, favouring ...”

“... transcend suffering gave him another reason to remove himself from the music, to pursue an art of self-erasure. From 1946 to 1948 Cage worked on the piece that many still consider his masterpiece, the Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, which used the same piano-as-percussion-orchestra technique he had pioneered with Syvilla Fort a decade earlier. This ...”

“... view,’ McBride writes, ‘the penal code permitted the Ascendancy to admire its own confident self-portrait, undisturbed by the continuing challenge posed by the resilience of the majority faith in Ireland’. His aim is to counterpoint Ascendancy pomp and complaint with a portrait of, on the one hand, the resilience of Catholic life and, on the ...”

“... the sociological together into a single argument. His feat was all the smarter for being highly self-conscious. In its course, the professor pushed his way forward through the history of palaeolithic studies, appraising and criticising predecessors, before borrowing from the philosopher Alison Wylie a name for his own method. He was ‘cabling’, he ...”

“... of savages’. The only stories most people wanted to hear were heroic tales of derring-do and self-sacrifice. Quite a cult developed around Franklin, with his widow as its high priestess: no longer merely the man who ate his boots, Franklin came to be celebrated as one of the empire’s great pioneers. In 1866 an eight-foot high bronze statue proclaiming ...”

“... for a million-person march in Bangkok. With Thaksin gone, his supporters have formed their own self-sustaining networks, which will probably survive even if he is no longer able to fund them. From exile, Thaksin promises: ‘I haven’t received justice and I will not give up.’Thailand’s globalised economy may lead to even greater inequality between ...”

“... have shifted. Giustozzi argues that the Taliban realise their old position on education was self-defeating and lost them support, and the line is now being reversed. In Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand, according to Tom Coghlan, one of Giustozzi’s contributors, people in September 2008 ‘reported a strikingly less repressive interpretation of the ...”

“... huge sums of money supporting the Nationalists. The Nazi regime was trying to make Germany as self-sufficient as possible through its policy of ‘autarky’, in preparation for the coming war in Europe. But it was short of important raw materials, many of which could be found in Spain. Franco and the Nationalists didn’t have enough hard cash to pay the ...”

“... Twitter feed featuring responses like ‘Jonah Lehrer’s speech should be titled “Recognising self-deluded assholes and how to avoid them in the future”’ and ‘Rantings of a Delusional, Unrepentant Narcissist’. But no one demanded that he get raped and stabbed. And at least he had actually done something wrong. Stone and Sacco’s jokes were ...”

“... be sure Chaucer committed. So my dark suspicions about the genre of biography may be rather self-serving. Not all literary biography fits the rubric of popular history. Some of it appeals more to the submerged fantasist, hoarder of dangerous titbits, or amateur detective. Merkin enjoys Panthea Reid’s account of Woolf as a guilty secret: she obviously ...”

“... now reappears in New York. So does booze, a topic to which Remarque fondly returns to the brink of self-parody; his characters, men and women, are always holding out a glass for more or exclaiming over the quality of the next bottle. In The Promised Land it’s vodka or cognac. During the doomed love affair in Arch of Triumph, Ravic and Joan drank Calvados in ...”