“... into the 19th century – it seems to have been, like Blind Harry’s Wallace, something which no self-respecting Scots household was complete without. This popularity has caused modern scholars some perplexity. It is not that early readers of the poem knew something about it that we don’t, to judge from the parody of 1701 that Jack quotes, in which ...”

“... sculling on the Neckar was another Englishman. But in spite of all the defects, the emotional self-indulgence, the melancholy (after all, he lost two wives whom he liked), the meanness to his daughters (Virginia reckoned he spent about £300 on her education), he still emerges as ‘an adorable man, and somehow tremendous’. It is Virginia Woolf’s ...”

“... to have forgotten most of what I thought I’d learned up to then’. Why such essentially vain self-criticism? And if Pynchon really does feel so deprecatory, if the collection is therefore of mostly historical value, then by what critical scruple did he choose to omit the only other story he has published, ‘Mortality and Mercy in ...”

“... him as an ambitious and hard-working man who went to work at the age of 13 and from then on was self-taught by attendance at night classes (none of them concerned with science). His father and mother worked their way up in the world ‘into what might be called the lower middle class’ by sheer hard work and resolved at whatever cost to themselves to ...”

“... with Bikhu Parekh’s efforts to unravel her political philosophy. Much of it strikes me as rather self-contradictory; and its general purport does not seem to get us very far. She discussed revolution at some length, ignoring classes, economics and even religion. She contemplated writing about Marx, but seems to have shrunk from the creative effort – that ...”

“... French writing on the Revolution, from Michelet onwards, has taken the form of the historian’s self-identification, whether from a Royalist or from a Republican point of view, with the events he was commemorating. As Lefebvre once said of Robespierre, ‘Après tout, c’est mon ami.’ For Furet this is easily understood since French politics, from 1789 ...”

“... 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 ...”