“... he stuck at a task which cost him so much, but also offered him so much in terms of a renewed self-respect; there is the opportunity for intimacy with the woman he always loved but never possessed, Sara Hutchinson, who acted as his amanuensis while he was writing it. All this is very well done, if a touch sentimental, a bit too insistently part of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that Cohen wants to get back into philosophy but without too much of the sentimentality and self-importance that such I’s usually collect around themselves these days. Though Cohen doesn’t say this in so many words, a joke that fails is a form of madness. If you want to know what scepticism feels like, if you want to feel it really kick in, tell ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... probably the whole place is Purgatory, since nearly all of us are so, so to speak, hell-bent on self-improvement. Something about my dear weird Golden State obliges it to assume allegorical and oracular proportions. A quarter of a century ago, everyone from Jean Baudrillard to Umberto Eco scanned it as a sort of crystal ball in which the future could be ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”