Nice essay at Armavirumque (actually written in 2000) about the ruse that was Arthur Miller.

Interesting story of how a Welsh schoolmaster, cleaning out desk drawers, discovers a cache of World War One medals. No one remembers how or why the school has them.

I keep hearing that terrible cliche "I believe in myself." Half of the awful wannabe singers who appear on "American Idol," in between tears and fist-shaking, leer at the camera and say, "I believe in myself." And I usually leer back, saying from my couch, "So did Josef Stalin. What does that have to do with you having a terrible voice?" Frankly, the fact that they believe in themselves is exactly the problem; their faith in their own talent is delusional.

One can believe in oneself too much, and that is vanity. Pride is believing in oneself. Those with the mightiest belief in themselves are the greatest dangers and the greatest fools.

Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true. Once I remember walking with a prosperous publisher, who made a remark which I had often heard before; it is, indeed, almost a motto of the modern world. Yet I had heard it once too often, and I saw suddenly that there was nothing in it. The publisher said of somebody, "That man will get on; he believes in himself." And I remember that as I lifted my head to listen, my eye caught an omnibus on which was written "Hanwell." I said to him, "Shall I tell you where the men are who believe most in themselves?
For I can tell you. I know of men who believe in themselves more colossally than Napoleon or Caesar. I know where flames the fixed star of certainty and success. I can guide you to the thrones of the Super-men. The men who really believe in themselves are all in lunatic asylums." He said mildly that there were a good many men after all who believed in themselves and who were not in lunatic asylums. "Yes, there are," I retorted, "and you of all men ought to know them. That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you were hiding in a back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail, because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness.

G. K. Chesterton, ORTHODOXY