“... patterns all over the walls – as if to reclaim the kind of ancient bric-a-brac that most self-respecting antiquarians would simply have thrown away, to make a radically new style of classical display. Not all visitors enjoy this Soane Experience. Young George was predictably dismissive of the house and its collections. The interior, he wrote, was ...”

“... never properly command. Hamlet achieves manhood, even if with a coarser, colder and more withdrawn self; he becomes what Henry James called ‘finely aware and richly responsible’, as a literary hero for James preferably should be. This is beyond Henry’s ken. It may also be a sign of the tragedy’s formidable solidity, a statement about the cost of living ...”

“... was a close-run thing, for all the decisiveness of the eventual victory. Despite its bravery and self-sacrifice, the Argentinian air force failed to exploit its opportunities against the carriers and liners, and at San Carlos – as General Moore admitted – there could have been a disaster had the enemy concentrated on the landing craft rather than the ...”

“... victory in the Six-Day War.In France, with its record of collaboration in the murder of the Jews, self-discovery by descendants and survivors of the Holocaust had to be taken one cautious step at a time. Many far-right French revanchists who regretted the loss of Algeria were also passionate antisemites and it paid for the Jewish community not to cause a ...”

“... leaders that they will be able to soften any reforms through a consultation process. These self-imposed strictures reminded me of a scene in the memoirs of David Kirkwood, who in 1922 became the Labour MP for Dumbarton Burghs. Kirkwood, a member of the ILP and a supporter of Scottish home rule, recalled that soon after his arrival in Parliament, he ...”

“... war’. Research into soldier-civilian relations has redrawn the image of the gallant GI, self-disciplined, chivalrous and sexually well-behaved. Sexual interactions were usually consensual: women were attracted to the well-mannered, well-dressed GIs, who brought with them new dance steps and novel ways of being courteous. But many women became ...”

“... to Merer, grain from two regions in the Nile Delta. Yet the extent and unity of Egypt was far from self-evident in this period. One of the traditional titles of the Egyptian king was ‘the uniter of two lands’, an acknowledgment that from its earliest history Egypt was comprised of two distinct centres of power: Memphis, at the base of the Nile Delta, and ...”

“... in helping to reshape Western views of antiquity. The unsympathetic reader might consider the work self-indulgent: its seven hundred pages cover Brown’s career and literary production only as far as 1987, while 38 years of elder-statesman life and major books have followed since. The case for the defence is that Brown has never written a dull or inelegant ...”

“... bust. And he commissioned Roubiliac to do a sculpture of Shakespeare in the guise of a prosperous self-made professional just like himself. He also re-wrote the plays in accordance with bourgeois sensibilities.Yet the cult of Shakespeare flourished because he could be plausibly presented as outsoaring mere sectional interests. By the time of Garrick’s ...”

“... to the Thistle, where those identified as being at high risk of death are prescribed diamorphine, self-administered under supervision. The diamorphine leaves him ‘gouching’ – drowsy and lethargic – which makes it harder to beg. ‘People see me asleep and they think: “He’s a smackhead,” which is true.’ But his use of the EDTS means he is using ...”

“... aren’t worth marrying.’Vance thinks that the ‘trials of my youth instilled a debilitating self-doubt’. He’s often unsure that he’s doing the right thing, or that he really believes what he believes. One of the more remarkable sentences in Hillbilly Elegy is ‘I’ll never forget the time I convinced myself that I was gay.’ Before becoming a ...”

“... and wears its autobiographical elements (literally) on its sleeve, but it is also self-consciously a work of fiction, because the narrator – and no doubt the author, too, though it makes things simpler to do both him and his book the courtesy of maintaining the fiction that it’s fiction – has learned from his father’s negative example ...”

“... clear language allows us to laugh not only at the man’s predicament, but also at his self-importance. Poochigian translates the name Kinesias (‘Fucker’) as ‘Harden’, and has him bewail his frustration in suitably ridiculous terms:She has destroyed me! Killed me! Even worse:she got me all worked up and then just left.Oh, what I’m going ...”

“... them, why there’s any interest in you in the first place. Debré’s books are postures, the self-fashioning of someone for whom sexuality is a signifier, a carabiner you can clip to your jeans. In the closing section of Name, the narrator has a conversation in a café with a 32-year-old Arab man who has spent a third of his life in prison. As she writes ...”

“... and – like the speeches Shakespeare composed for his tragic king – remarkable monuments to his ...”