“... that of the man with his doll and his box. But a name is always a role for Borges, an idea of the self, and the interplay between actor and part takes many forms in his writing. In one of his early prose works, The Universal History of Infamy (1935), Borges says of Billy the Kid that he ‘never fully measured up to the legend of himself, but he came closer ...”

“... Where did their freedom of movement, their composure come from? What consequences did their self-sufficiency have? Men stared and remarked and observed: women tried to look down and away and sideways. Women were among the sights that flâneurs took in as they slid through the crowds on the streets, but to look boldly in return was to designate oneself a ...”

“... south-west United States, expensive houses abundantly equipped with solar panels to offer energy self-sufficiency, or near enough, were much in demand in the 1970s – there was even something of a boom in cave-houses, luxurious villas semi-submerged in the ground for better insulation in both winter and summer. It was the same in industry. After 1973, much ...”

“... 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 ...”