“... these men follow their base instincts, when they find themselves incapable of exercising any more self-restraint than the dog who tried to mount her when she was six. Talking about her abusive ex-partner, she is similarly fatalistic:Steve Silver is in the racing hall of fame, but when he drank he’d beat me. I was with him seven years. He wouldn’t let me ...”

“... must have belonged to adults who suffered from ‘malnutrition’, a mind-boggling level of self-deception. (Krznaric is better known as a pop philosopher, but his doctoral dissertation was based on a revealing set of interviews with Guatemala’s power-brokers, people who generally never speak.) Many in Guatemala would still like to believe that human ...”

“... may be found in the later novels of Patrick O’Brian.) Is it too fanciful to see a common and self-consciously phlegmatic character as well? Chile is divided almost as surely from its continental neighbours, by the spine of the Andes, as is Britain by the Channel. The outlook is maritime: the principal industry is, or was, mining. Gabriel García Márquez ...”

“... for the young queen. They are full of serious historical research and wild, passionate moments of self-abandon. There are marvellous scenes in the first book, most of the fun provided by the virile Bothwell:Bothwell came to the queen’s apartment and he stood on the threshold of the room, smiling at her as he had smiled in the Exchequer House.She cried out ...”

“... O’Neill’s Open Marriage: A New Lifestyle for Couples, a mixture of anthropological study and self-help guide, which suggested that ‘sexual fidelity is the false god of closed marriage.’ The Joy of Sex combined a relaxed, humorous tone with Comfort’s medical and scientific credentials (he was initially billed as its editor rather than author). Its ...”

“... offer not just funding, but also long-term sustainment.’ Marc Andreessen is the author of the self-aggrandising ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’, which includes a list of enemies (such as universities, the woke mind virus, degrowth, sustainability and, inexplicably, ‘Thomas Sowell’s Unconstrained Vision, Alexander Kojève’s Universal and Homogeneous ...”

“... that often cluster round it. He didn’t care much for fame, for instance, or go in for self-advertisement, was careless about his reputation and was unmoved by criticism. So much about him is mature and admirable he seems a bigger baby for what is not. It was Kallman who found Auden dead in 1973, lying in his hotel bed in Vienna after a poetry ...”

“... of silver cutlery, three watches and fourteen gold rings. I picture the Berkshires: busy, eager, self-preoccupied, until something touches them too nearly, at which point they take an interest all the greater for their previous neglect. It makes sense of their not having given much mind to Bonell’s ‘frequent’ habit of bringing men up to his ...”

“... on their obverses. Alberti appeared on the medals of Matteo de’ Pasti and also crafted his own self-portrait on a bronze plaquette. By mid-century he had become a prominent antiquarian and architect, who counselled and worked for Giovanni Rucellai, head of a great Florentine clan, as well as the rulers of Ferrara, Rimini and other cities. And he never ...”

“... the classical study of kinship systems had foundered on the rocks of the discipline’s endemic self-critique. Godelier’s The Metamorphoses of Kinship (2004) brought the subject back to the fore with an energy rarely found in contemporary anthropological writing. The book ranged widely, examining the long history of the field; the way that kinship had ...”

“... and haggard, may be clothed in animal skins like John the Baptist and is an image of anguish, self-abnegation and loss. By contrast, when a visitor to Titian’s studio commented on his version of the penitent saint, all rosy and dewy and plump, Titian ‘answered laughing that he had painted her on the first day … before she began fasting, in order to ...”

“... which banned all works of instruction in the magical arts. But this turned out to be another self-defeating measure that did more to excite interest in the prohibited books than anything else.According to Davies, a shift in the official view of magic was precipitated by the investigation in 1678 into a plot to poison Louis XIV. As the recently created ...”

“... and representative liberal politics.Relative to the other European powers, Britain and Russia were self-sufficient. They had an important common interest in preventing the domination of the Continent by France or Germany. Beyond that, they had distinct spheres of influence where neither was very interested in supporting the other. As a result, their occasional ...”

“... Judgment is opaque, only realised through the particularities of each case. Gallant was a hugely self-doubting writer – there are those scraps in the waste basket and also her anxious letters, hungry for validation, to Maxwell. (‘I have no judgment of my own work … and really, very little confidence except during the actual period of writing, so that I ...”

“... Menschenkenner” ’ (i.e. no judge of people). To those who are not au fait with the subtle, self-protecting, teasing ways in which psychoanalysis both tries and refuses to connect with the external world this may seem surprising. ‘Throughout his life’, Malcolm continues, Freud ‘was beset by the affliction of overestimation’, but since the ...”