“... support to Pitt, asking with growing concern about his fragile health, suggest more than general self-interested good wishes. Stroud concluded that Brown’s sympathies were essentially Whig, which seems probable, unlike Jane Brown’s entirely unsupported theory that he was a secret Jacobite. Even so she is right to suggest that the intricately literary ...”

“... that historians have consistently underestimated the ‘centrality of Western eyes’ in Soviet self-understanding or, to put it differently, the degree to which Soviet leaders worried about how their actions would look in the West. This could reach ludicrous proportions: when the 1937 census came in millions short of the projected population ...”

“... He could have been charged with malicious wounding and attempted murder – true, he could plead self-defence, but such a plea from an illegitimate idle vagrant who had stabbed a gentleman would hardly have been listened to at Bow Street. He was also guilty of what the Enquiry calls ‘a high Offence against the Public Good’ for failing to initiate a ...”

“... threw his stories together from whatever sources came to hand but agree that he was opportunistic, self-justifying and, in political matters, accident-prone even for a man moving through a landscape littered with banana skins. In a long interview he gave to Numa Sadoul in 1971, then spent three years revising, Hergé said: ‘My childhood, my adolescence, Boy ...”

“... by modern interpreters. To Velikovsky, all this was yet another manifestation of Freud’s Jewish self-hatred. How dare he impugn the Old Testament story about who the Jews were and how they came to be Chosen? But Freud’s methods in Moses and Monotheism nevertheless signalled a productive new way of interpreting human history, one in which psychoanalytic ...”

“... appeal system, delivered himself of the judicial opinion that the legal incapacity of women was so self-evident that it was ‘incomprehensible … that anyone acquainted with our laws … can think, if indeed anyone does think, there is room for argument’. It was not until 1929 that the Privy Council, in an appeal from Canada about the eligibility of women ...”

“... sanctuary, with both of them fans of the naturalist R.M. Lockley. There were a few volumes of self-help in the house but the only non-library book of autobiography was I Haven’t Unpacked by William Holt, who had got away from the dark, satanic mills by buying a horse and riding through England. The Armley library was at the bottom of Wesley Road, the ...”

“... couldn’t be that God made sickness,’ she argued. ‘It turned people into useless self-centred people who became a burden to themselves and to everyone else.’ The religion’s antipathy to medicine added a further strand to the Astors’ troublesome relations with their children. When their oldest daughter, Wissie, had a serious riding ...”

“... that they are willing to wolf them down by the millions. (It’s a subject in its own right, the self-reinforcing phenomenon of the contemporary mega-seller; by which I mean not just the garden variety bestseller but the book or books which go to that mysterious other place in the popular consciousness, when it’s as if reading them has somehow been made ...”

“... mythology, Old English literature, religion (Tolkien was a devout Catholic, Lewis at this point a self-described agnostic), fantasy and beer. Tolkien played some part in Lewis’s rediscovery of his Christian faith at the beginning of the 1930s, though he was disappointed that his friend stopped at the halfway house of Anglicanism (in so far as Lewis adopted ...”

“... something even less expected: a development pattern that, beginning around 1200 BCE, was entirely self-generated. Instead of being implanted from outside, the Israelite hilltop culture had grown up entirely on its own. Such findings should have been a godsend for Sand since they showed that the Israelites, far from conquering the whole of Canaan, had taken ...”

“... children. It works. But the location of the point of view is not clear. Is it Abbott’s own self-awareness we are reading? Is it the view of Connell, whom he is with? Is it a detached, authoritative, implied narrator? The mobility and occasional ambiguity of perspective becomes more complex in Salter’s later works. In A Sport and a Pastime we have a ...”

“... shortcomings in practice; the dangers of superstition and its grip on his life. He was not above self-loathing, though Niehaus never says as much. Crucially, for anthropologist and monograph, Jimmy could switch in a trice between foul and fair: eye of newt and tongue of frog one moment, the resounding victory of his pupils in end-of-year exams the ...”

“... agendas of strategic internationalism. Such a position, as Clark noted, laid Dorn wide open to the self-inflating hysteria and reflex moral outrage that were the defining characteristics of Pacific Rim academia. ‘In Boulder, if you tell an obscene politically incorrect joke, someone may laugh,’ Clark said. ‘And if you say something incredibly insulting ...”

“... image and the propaganda shot where people hold fast to staged poses; above all in the billions of self-portraits in which each photographer shows time and again how she or he wishes to be seen and known to the world.From the age of three until the age of thirteen, Cumming’s mother, Betty Elston – born in 1926 – was much photographed. Her ...”