“... American living in England and France and dreaming of the frontier, the second by a self-described ‘man without a country’, an American brought up in England and Ireland who, writing in Los Angeles, longed for the country from which he had exiled himself. We are undergoing a Chandler revival. The Library of America has published his complete ...”

“... had a slightly rehearsed feel about it. Repeated telling is clearly not enough, however, as he is self-medicating with large quantities of alcohol and drugs, and wants help in stopping. Before I arrived I was worried that working through an interpreter would be too inhibiting, but my patients tell me they don’t mind. Indeed, they prefer the fact that I am ...”

“... Church was the State. It has always been clear that neutrality in the war made Ireland insular, self-obsessed and uneasy with itself. Kenny is correct when she writes that ‘neutrality in the Second World War was widely, indeed overwhelmingly, supported by the people of Eire, as Catholic Ireland was called before it became a Republic in 1949.’ She goes ...”

“... against which Tito’s Partisans, with British support, were fighting in Yugoslavia. Now, however, self-interest was bringing the country under the increasing influence of an advancing Russia, even while the Comintern, based in Moscow and led by the Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov, was encouraging Bulgarian Partisans against the Bulgarian Government. In ...”

“... independence) into imaginary rambles through my own city (founded 50 BC); and indulging a slightly self-conscious relish for the lanes and livery-halls and melancholy churches of London, alongside a faintly supercilious dismay at the trashiness and sprawl of my temporary home. Bradley has written an enthralling introduction, giving a historical overview of the ...”

“... former more an emotional attachment, the latter involving both political allegiance and economic self-interest. More recently, the pattern has shifted: identification with Scotland has grown in intensity, while the tie to England has assumed an emotive dimension. In general, the elderly and the Protestant tend to have stronger feelings of Britishness than ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... who was always in the Patients’ Club was a musician. I envied him his supply of small talk, his self-deprecating charm, and I tried to overhear his conversations, surrounded as I was by my enormous silence. One day he disappeared from the ward and when he came back, he was pale and utterly washed out. It was not too difficult to save up those pills that ...”

“... urban pleasure: Alfred de Musset, in imitation of De Quincey, described flânerie as a process of self-detachment, in which the subject gives himself up to the ‘spectacle du moment’: ‘J’ai flâné dans les rues: j’ai marché devant moi, libre, bayant aux grues’ (‘I strolled around, I walked ahead of myself, free, gaping at the whores’). Sadler ...”

“... persona, a breadth of voice, a large collection of masks, the favourite being timid, little, self-effacing Lorine. ‘Lorine was shy and unworldly,’ Jerry Reisman wrote, ‘but she was lively and talkative when with people she liked. Her sense of humour sparkled in conversation as it does in her poetry and sometimes she was surprisingly ...”

“... were ‘low’ because an educated, erudite, gentlemanly writer was stooping. For Richardson, the self-made former apprentice boy, who later gave Clarissa the appearance of literariness by inserting gobbets from a dictionary of literary ‘beauties’, the charge was altogether more significant. The originality of Pamela was its transformation of ...”

“... a rambling sailor waiting for her on every quay. These images, projected at random from the buried self, create the poem in their own right. They are romantic images; but death was also ‘the whole dreadful heap’ which she had witnessed often enough, and the time when she would not have to think any more, or even be.‘I mean to go through the door without ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... And anti-semitism. Romania’s problem was not just a lack of men who were sufficiently virile and self-sacrificing: the country was being suffocated by a surfeit of Jews, with their predatory activities compounding their parasitic presence. Accounting for 800,000 out of a total population of around 19 million, Jews were particularly visible in the regions of ...”

“... 1975, he was hanged in Port of Spain’s Royal Jail. Michael X was a huckster, an opportunistic self-shaper who managed to maximise the returns on his racial background. Like every con-man’s story, his is fascinating and it’s a pity that Windrush does not feature more like it. It’s also noticeable that while the authors are given to romanticising ...”