“... the sphere of public history where the past is captured in abiding cultural myths of inheritance, self-image and identity’, have been so seriously misunderstood, it is now the historian’s job to look afresh. Would that Tyerman had given more space to those processes of myth-formation. He briefly alludes in his preface to persons unspecified ‘who regard ...”

“... some nine months before the war, that Israel would bring down Syria’s new regime, part of a self-fulfilling logic? Were words, on both sides, the real protagonists? The attitude of the Israeli security elite to Egyptian military movements always went hand in hand with the question ‘do they recognise our superiority?’ – which is, of course, a ...”

“... who were starting to take package trips to Benidorm instead – we, like the rest of the hardy self-improving lower middle classes, were bound for places where farmhouse bed and breakfasts cowered beneath looming ridges of wet, windswept heather, where there were ample supplies of fiddle music, and where every fishing village and handicrafts exhibition ...”

“... of a Ben Jonson play – ambition, assertion of power, mafioso cunning, subtlety, even fear and self-preservation or (in the case of secret police chiefs) a taste for cruelty. Few wonder about the inveterate hardliners who seem to present no occasion for historical revision, Rákosi, Suslov or Gerö, mistaken though it is to take their inflexibility for ...”

“... for it. When all parties begin to see conflict as inevitable, then the ‘inevitable’ becomes self-fulfilling. Americans are fond of comparing the situation in the region to the 1930s and the rise of totalitarianism; but perhaps Europe in 1914 is a better metaphor: the situation is such that some small, unexpected autonomous event might trigger a sequence ...”

“... to overcome his opponents; his prose and his public remarks were invariably leaden, sarcastic and self-righteous, and were no match for William F. Buckley’s elegant scorn. In his view, he was a victim, pure and simple: ‘the principal journalistic scapegoat for the rise to power of Fidel Castro and for the success of the Cuban Revolution’, a latter-day ...”

“... McLaren reminds us, was first used in English in 1748, implying, as he says, a new self-consciousness about what manliness might be. Impotence was no joke, and women might be another species. In the 19th century​ , according to McLaren, gender differences were both privileged – over differences of rank, status, profession, race and religion ...”

“... was something Muggleton brought to the original Reeveite revelation, saving the sect from the un-self-fulfilling fate of failed prophecy, that scene on the mountain top in Beyond the Fringe. But the death of Oliver Cromwell, the collapse of the English republic, and the restoration of the monarchy also helped. In the 1660s it was no longer either credible or ...”

“... As Obama’s speeches have won countless new admirers, it’s just more evidence of how eager self-selected opinion-formers are to be sweet-talked, not of how ordinary people are likely to vote. As Clinton has shifted her ground and the basis of her campaign, from heir presumptive to picked-on woman to plucky and indefatigable underdog, it’s evidence of ...”

“... by contrast, had been only 31 at his death. Galba was no golden boy with artistic leanings, but a self-consciously old-fashioned senior citizen, with the kind of physical disfigurements (including a particularly unsightly hernia which required a truss) that might still count as marks of distinction to those who valued the ...”

“... The most popular explanation, at least on the left, finds cultural anxieties trumping economic self-interest. The heartland Republicans yearn for a lost social order, for the halcyon days before feminists, homosexuals, affirmative action, pierced noses, secular humanists, multicultural talk and Italian coffee (‘latte liberal’: this season’s favourite ...”

“... alliance between the state and the industry in which the industry delivered textual policing and self-censorship in exchange for economic privileges’, and their consequence was that much of the reading public between 1600 and 1780, who could not afford the inflated prices of new books charged by the cartel, were confined to texts that were increasingly ...”

“... I may have had drained away as the ever ebullient, jokey, matey, vindictive Morgan described a self-contained world of vacant celebrity and tawdry sensationalism that I have never quite believed anyone took seriously. But it becomes clear that Morgan took it very seriously indeed and so do the people whose lives were his raison d’être as an editor and ...”

“... European history, too, that religious belief has often been a more powerful force than economic self-interest, or even common sense. In this respect, the ‘separation of church and state’ enshrined in the US Constitution has always been something of a distraction. It meant only that no single church, whether the British-backed Episcopalianism or the ...”

“... to her immediately. I’d like to think that she also liked me, that something in my 11-year-old self attracted her apart from my spiritual condition. Maybe so, but I was a lonely, curious child – a sitting duck for conversion – and her campaign began almost immediately. Books were her ammunition. I would devour anything with a plot. I had read Bible ...”