There he discovered that he loved beauty, and loved himself with an untroubled and unselfish love.
He himself coined the aphorism: "Narcissism is not a vice provided you go the whole way with it" – which, Harrod says, "he paired with Sylvia Townsend Warner's 'he too was a beauty lover and loved himself with an untroubled and unselfish love'".
If their marriage were to work out, Kent would need to learn to love himself, to fill himself with his own spiritual connection, rather than depend upon Julia to constantly fill him.
Hitler was often described as an egomaniac who "only loved himself" — a narcissist with a taste for self-dramatization and what Mr. Ullrich calls a "characteristic fondness for superlatives".
"Unfortunately, when she admitted she hated yellow and he loved it, what she was really saying was that she hated him and he loved himself," Mr. Galen said, with a laugh.
So, of course, the man who loves surrounding himself with No. 1 adores that extra interest.
It shouldn't make President Obama feel bad, either — even though Giuliani, on Wednesday night, managed to conflate love for himself with all kinds of grander emotions.
Set in the waning years of Edwardian England, it tells the story of Christopher Tietjens, a solid Tory and the heir to massive estate, who endures a fraught marriage with his unfaithful and alluringly venomous wife, Sylvia, while denying himself love and happiness with a young woman called Valentine Wannop.
Hope, however, is engaged to a fussy and pompous Englishman, Lord Evelyn Oakleigh (the excellent Adam Godley), who's much more in love with himself than with any woman, let alone his fiancée.
