“... of what the same speaker calls ‘this world-cataclysmic drama’. As for the second passage, how self-important would you have to be (at 15) to ‘become conscious of an oscillation of temperament’, or ‘appreciate a countervailing vision of tolerant scepticism’? Surely neither life nor Sheila Rowbotham is like that. But the sense of whatever authentic ...”

“... to admit that they probably irradiated some innocent bystanders. The United States Government self-righteously fights any liability tooth and claw in the courts. The British Government hides behind an Act of Parliament which was never intended to assist in avoiding culpability. On 3 October 1952, the British Government, anxious to retain its role as a ...”

“... appearance, blessed with an air of extraordinary propriety, but a man of paradox. He was a self-confessed snob who enjoyed moving in what he called ‘the great world’, by which he meant the narrow orbit of country houses and fashionable quasi-literary circles where he believed the best writers were to be met. I never quite found my way there, but ...”

“... but this is almost certainly not the case. It was rather that he seemed to lack any kind of self-doubt or self-criticism. How else could he claim, in his interpretation of the Sistine Ceiling, that Julius II’s ‘favourite theologian’ was a man whom the Pope may never have met, and whose work he may never have ...”

“... of Eden belonged to the tragedy of the peasantry in the 19th century. The family farm in Wyre was self-sufficient, they ate bannocks, butter, cheese and milk made by themselves from their own fields and their own animals, they sent the wool from their own sheep to a Border town to be made up into clothes, and they ate so much crab and lobster from the sea ...”

“... in the Fifties. But today, more than 65 years after it was created, the humour seems trite and self-consciously cute, although this may be due to the current preference for technique over subtlety. Les Masques(1933) was the first ballet to incorporate what became known as the ‘Fred Step’ (a combination of five steps which he credited to Pavlova). It ...”

“... the predominant buyer in the market, capable of dictating the terms of trade. This success led Robert Thorpe, the former chief justice of the colony, to launch a scathing attack on the company in the London press. By dominating trade in Sierra Leone, he argued, wasn’t Macaulay & Babington acting as a domineering economic agent of the sort that Smith and ...”

“... this isn’t the sort of thing it’s worth worrying about in a thriller; I once read a novel by Robert Ludlum in which the hero gives his London cab driver a £100 note. Anyway, ‘a group of pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia separatists assaulted a ranch in northern Algeria where Suliman Cindoruk was believed to be hiding’ – huh? just roll with it – but they ...”

“... two-hour battle with the ‘slave breaker’ Edward Covey as the most significant example of his self-mythologising. On Covey’s dilapidated farmstead, Blight writes, ‘Ishmael found his Ahab, the ultimate tyrant whose obsessions could never be tamed.’ But in trying to break the slave, Covey himself was broken. ‘I felt as I never felt ...”

“... artistic canons merely disguised the simple fact that they weren’t very important to anyone’s self-fashioning. By the late 1990s the humanities appeared marginal even to the universities, driven as they were by Federal grants and corporate connections to the sciences. Moreover, in the wake of the ‘new economy’, pundits began to wonder what the ...”

“... the third category, although I understand it very soberly, without a shadow of sentimentality or self-pity . . . To be homeless . . . means only that the person having this defect cannot indicate the streets, cities or community that might be his home, his, as one is wont to say, miniature homeland. It is this ...”

“... are being addressed in a new edition. The book begins with a prologue describing the magnificently self-congratulatory dinner held to celebrate completion of the original OED in Goldsmiths’ Hall on 6 June 1928. This was Derby Day, which allows Winchester to describe the social scene and to opine: ‘A great horse race on a sunny afternoon tends always to ...”

“... artifice that can be entered only after things have broken down. They are, in short, as self-propelling and potentially dangerous as the sexual fantasies of The Fermata. The Fermata lost Baker a number of fans (‘Goodbye Nicholson Baker, goodbye for ever,’ Victoria Glendinning said). He has been scrambling ever since to recover his accreditation ...”

“... to be you, then you are conscious. Consciousness is also, as before, sometimes seen as a special self-aware kind of thought. So today the literature often makes divisions between different senses of the term, distinguishing ‘phenomenal’ consciousness – the feel of experience – from senses that have to do with ...”

“... and sometimes malevolent publications against the grievances of the innocent and the weak. Self-regulation, as its apologists call it, is not of course peculiar to newspapers. Doctors and lawyers discovered its attractions long ago, and anyone who buys a new house with crumbling brickwork or a leaking roof soon finds out that the National ...”