“... structured to suit men, preferably men with stay-at-home wives. The qualities rewarded there – self-reliance, ambition, single-minded devotion to work – make women unfit for marriage and vice versa. By the time they are ready to settle down, their male contemporaries are married or looking for younger, softer women; if it’s not too late for a ...”

“... and which he reiterates throughout the book. Europeans are now Kantians, seeking to inhabit ‘a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and co-operation’. The United States, by contrast, ‘remains mired in history, exercising power in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable’. He goes on ...”

“... Colonial Office knew that a stable ‘Malayan’ nation could not be created and brought towards self-government while the enormous Chinese immigrant population was excluded from citizenship – treated as if it did not exist. And yet they themselves shared much of the anti-Chinese prejudice. The British entered South-East Asia in the wake of the Portuguese ...”

“... Isherwood.) In contrast to his reserve in company, however, Maugham was addicted in his writing to self-disclosure: ‘Most of what one writes is to a greater or lesser degree autobiographical.’ Though his narrative persona was cynical and detached, his books were filled with accounts of his own miserable experiences of childhood, love and marriage; as well ...”

“... extremely vague, even in the so-called Act XXX of 1836. The campaign was also an opportunity for self-aggrandisement on the part of some Company officials, most conspicuously Sleeman, who published the so-called ‘standard work on thuggee’, Ramaseeana, or a vocabulary of the peculiar language used by the Thugs (1836). According to a report he wrote in May ...”

“... nostalgia on the early days of psychoanalysis. ‘When we scrutinise the personalities who, by self-selection, became the first generation of psychoanalysts,’ she said, we are left in no doubt about their characteristics. They were the unconventional ones, the doubters, those who were dissatisfied with the limitations imposed on knowledge; also among ...”

“... but liberally rewarded. His own speeches and the letters attributed to him are so laden with self-promotion and so rhetorically wrought as to leave their author’s real personality and intentions in question. Historians have been sharply divided in their assessments of Demosthenes, some seeing him as a consummate politician who never uttered a sentence ...”

“... creature: part memoir, part criticism, part fiction, part feminist tract or call to arms or self-help manual or biography or work of literary history. Perhaps the best clue to what she’s doing comes when the narrator considers ‘training to be a psychoanalyst, and I will become a feminist analyst to tortured, eccentric artists.’ This would be her ...”

“... might well have regarded with disdain. Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, the self-consciously classical narrative poems he published in 1593 and 1594, with their dutifully obsequious dedications to Southampton, were what mattered to him, rather than Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew and the early history plays, which he made no ...”

“... of the war and the reconstruction of French academic life and institutions, Febvre got his chance. Self-publicising was part of the plan. ‘Cite ourselves,’ he commanded around 1950, ‘don’t lose the opportunity to cite ourselves, to propagate what is essential, that is to say, our keywords. The threefold division of Braudel: milieu, collective ...”

“... is not transcendent but cynical. In St John’s pitch on behalf of poets Ariosto combines cheeky self-interest, a career courtier’s disenchanted take on patronage, and a highly sceptical view of history. If history consists of lies told by writers on behalf of their patrons, according to the author of the fourth Gospel, then … It is characteristic of ...”

“... ankle-biter, a demon chomper, a rattle-chucker, a rivalrous toad, green and pink and fat with self-concern, and we will often see this distinguished person most clearly in his letters. Saul Bellow knew the type very well and we meet one of them in the shape of Moses Herzog, the eponymous hero of Bellow’s sixth novel, a helpless, epistolary nutcase who ...”

“... and replied: ‘Go on with you! Scat!’ This image of a person obscurely in the know, at once self-collected and reticent, is also an image of the person Bishop became – or the one many took her to be. But Bishop knew that you could compel attention by declining to demand it, and that restraint could be a kind of plea. She once wrote of a friend: ‘She ...”

“... classes has inevitably become wider. The upper classes are, on the one hand, no longer weakened by self-doubt and self-criticism. Today the eminent know that success is just reward for their own capacity, for their own efforts, and for their own undeniable achievement. They deserve to belong to a superior class . . . As for ...”

“... even during the emergency – many extreme measures should remain off-limits. Nevertheless, the self-conscious design of an emergency regime may well be the best available defence against a panic-driven cycle of permanent destruction. One thing only is clear. There is no chance of a carefully modulated response unless we take some critical distance from the ...”