In Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" (1925), Septimus Smith, a shell-shocked veteran of The Great War, has a manic phase in which he sees himself as the latest figure in a historical sequence: "Greeks, Romans, Shakespeare, Darwin and now himself". Sir William Bradshaw, a renowned psychologist who examines Septimus, has a diagnosis for his self-image: it is "a common delusion" to have such delusions of grandeur instead of "a sense of proportion". Yet Bradshaw sees himself in such grand terms, too: "Worshipping proportion, Sir William not only prospered himself but made England prosper [...]." It is a common delusion for a man with social privilege and scholarly power to feel so self-important. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 October 2025)