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“... novels to make her point, and rapidly sketches in a much broader cultural background. She draws on Norbert Elias, and his story of the ‘ever-rising threshold of shame about bodily functions’, to trace the rise of personal autonomy. She follows Charles Taylor, in his great philosophical history Sources of the Self, to elucidate the evolving ...”

“... pioneered cultural studies there. Thirty-odd miles away at Leicester University, Ilya Neustadt and Norbert Elias gave the sociology department a more theoretical and international focus. Evaluation has had the effect of dispersing such centres. A comparison of career mobility data with the content of articles shows that the more similar scholars’ work ...”

“... see The Courtier in the terms more of social than political history: as a central document in what Norbert Elias called ‘the civilising process’, the long, slow history of how the European aristocracy finally learned to behave in an aristocratic way. Peter Burke treats The Book of the Courtier as an ‘open text’, whose dialogue form and apparent ...”

“... Mozart’s failure to secure a patron was raised to a higher level of sociological abstraction by Norbert Elias, one of many distinguished non-musicologists who have been tempted to write about him. In Elias’s late work Mozart: Zur Soziologie eines Genies (1991), Mozart becomes the first bourgeois composer, trying to ...”

“... CD player. A revolving bookcase on loan from the college library held more books (Frank Kermode, Norbert Elias, the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics) and had more papers stacked on top of it. Once there had been a bed in the inner room, but it had been used as a place to store books for so long that in the end the housekeeper took it ...”

“... back to the Ancient Greeks and given new life by the Renaissance. These assumptions were shared by Norbert Elias, whose The Civilising Process (1939) had charted the history of manners and civility, and the emergence of the modern state. What Betts shows, however, is that the term had many uses and many different definitions, even in the relatively short ...”

“... Peter Burke points out that the two historians who have done most to encourage this view are Norbert Elias and Michel Foucault. In The Civilising Process, first published in 1939, Elias argued that a rising European bourgeoisie sought to discipline itself by a complex regulation of bodily impulses and gestures ...”

“... on ‘science and civilisation’ in China and the West, Fernand Braudel on Europe’s economy, Norbert Elias on the emergence of civilised manners – have, in the very breadth of the comparisons they make, served to strengthen the prejudice that Europe was predestined to be superior in its economy, towns, institutions and learning, in its values of ...”

“... world, like Squire Western in Tom Jones and Captain Mirvan in Evelina. Barker-Benfield, guided by Norbert Elias, acutely notices changes in habits, manners and customs. Males were to acquire new sources of anxiety. In the new picture of the human being – which gave a high place to the sensitivity of the vibrating nerves and the fineness of particles ...”

“... That said, there is something persuasive about the analogy with dance. In the sense elaborated by Norbert Elias, the moderation of sexual behaviour, the rise of public modesty and of new standards of respectability constituted the civilising process just as did the contortions of the body demanded by ballet or the controlled steps of the minuet. The ...”

“... that the state, by curtailing ‘private’ violence, reduces the total amount of violence. As Norbert Elias pointed out more than half a century ago in The Civilising Process, what the state does is to centralise and monopolise violence in its own hands, a fact that Diamond, coming as he does from a nation that has initiated several wars in recent ...”

“... an old man’s sense of urgency, Charlemagne set about creating the kind of courtly society that Norbert Elias thought imaginable only in the early modern period and under quite other conditions. Charlemagne was determined to close the gap between ideal and reality across the empire, embarking on a great enterprise of social renewal. Nobles at court ...”

“... stars, intellectuals and journalists). The protocol was from the court of Louis XIV, as Norbert Elias described it: minutely orchestrated, with each guest carefully positioned in the web of etiquette. Those close to the ‘republican king’ were seated in the front rows. Others, less distinguished, sat behind. The president eventually entered ...”

“... was reacting against the dominant paradigm for understanding emotion in the premodern past: Norbert Elias’s The Civilising Process. For Elias, the Middle Ages were a time of uninhibited feeling, before regulation and refinement were introduced at the courts and dinner tables of early modern Europe. Rosenwein ...”

“... simplifications it has proved remarkably hard to kill. Many of us have paid exaggerated respect to Norbert Elias’s The Court Society (published in 1969 but essentially dating from the Twenties), whose apparent sophistication only thinly masks a simplistic argument, with a good deal of anachronism thrown in. Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie had begun to write ...”