“... worked with James Guthrie at the Peartree Press. She might have lived in Hampstead and gone to Robert Bevan’s Sundays, or tramped with Eleanor Farjeon to Edward Thomas’s cottage. As it was, she found herself in Bloomsbury. Even if they were, as Quentin Bell called them, ‘as amorphous as friends can be’, they were nearly all highly literate, and ...”

“... keeps emerging: their crowds are in constant need of surveillance and policing; the desperate self-imposed task of the theorist is to reduce the crowd’s protean qualities to manageable positive laws, to master the irrational through ‘the social defence’ of science and reason. The point was not, as today, to give out identity cards thereby to ...”

“... and are prevented by the country’s constitution from arming for any other purpose than immediate self-defence. But their ease has been increasingly disturbed. The United States has wanted to reduce its trading deficit with Japan. It has also been asking Tokyo to make a larger contribution to the wider defence of North-East Asia. By the early Eighties, the ...”

“... corroboration of the great conspiracy against goodness. Almost as monstrous is the film’s use of Robert Kennedy’s assassination as a mere item in Garrison’s self-vindication and patched-up private life. It proves he was right about everything, and it regains him (immediately) his wife’s love and respect and sexual ...”

“... the prospect of becoming his own assembly line, all he could think of was Under Under the Volcano. Robert Lowell writes: I memorised tricks to set the river on fire, somehow never wrote something to go back to. Lowry was the absolute opposite, no tricks and a work he was unable to get away from. He described himself as ‘a sometimes subtle if not good ...”

“... Anglo-Norman cuisine diverged from its French counterpart. Moreover – and this underlies a self-imposed limitation in the scope of All Manners of Food – neither French nor English cookery (let alone Italian or Spanish) can be properly understood without taking into account the extra-European influences upon which all relied in different degrees. As ...”

“... less of a stabilising force than they seem. Deadpan yet tongue in cheek, they constantly slip into self-mockery and teasing. ‘Some of my most classic cases,’ Holmes says, ‘have had the least promising commencement. You will remember, Watson, how the dreadful business of the Abernetty family was first brought to my notice by the depth which the parsley ...”

“... Maraniss’s biography of Obama’s first 27 years is that it confirms a hunch about Obama’s self-invention.* His vagabond life with a bohemian intellectual mother, and the charismatic and reckless father who went back to Africa, belong to an early childhood that the Maraniss book recalls in detail and others have explored too, but those years explain ...”

“... without them in the 1933 Supplement. This was the decision of the new Supplement’s chief editor, Robert Burchfield. Ogilvie criticises Burchfield, and her book has caused some fuss on account of its supposed allegation that he surreptitiously deleted words of foreign origin from the OED. She contends that by bringing back the tramlines Burchfield was ...”

“... concept of his science of roughness. What are fractals? The short answer is mathematical models of self-similarity and self-resemblance: objects whose parts mimic the whole. Natural examples abound: a cauliflower is made up of florets, or miniature cauliflowers, each of which in turn is composed of smaller florets, and so ...”

“... Mary Whitall Smith, lived for emotional drama and the struggle, as she would later put it, for ‘self-development, real education, knowledge, enjoyment’. From a wealthy family of Philadelphia Quakers, Mary shocked her parents by marrying Frank Costelloe, an Irish Catholic barrister with political ambitions. Their daughter Rachel (almost immediately known ...”

“... at this ingratitude, but his own account suggests ample cause for it. The trouble was that self-appointed experts from further east were forever telling the independent-minded settlers what was best for them. Eastern Montana was apparently so empty, so devoid of physical and social culture, that it could serve as the laboratory for any harebrained ...”

“... One of the difficulties with weapons is that they do not automatically self-destruct once they have fulfilled their function. The problem particularly afflicts Americans who, taking advantage of lax gun-control laws, tend to buy whatever they think they need to defend themselves. But as the danger recedes, they frequently forget about the lethal arsenals they have accumulated ...”

“... At the tail-end of 1892 Robert Louis Stevenson was working on a novel. The book was going well but one thing was bothering him. Serial publication, he felt, might be difficult to secure, since ‘The Justice Clerk’ – it would eventually be published as Weir of Hermiston – was both ‘queer’ and ‘pretty Scotch ...”

“... novels, is ultimately immutable, and Flanagan’s heroes reserve their bitterest scorn for the self-interested purveyors of the ‘necessary, sustaining lie’. Flanagan’s latest novel is a work of a different order of ambition, and its approach is at once more playful and more pessimistic. The narrative is circular, but this time its significance is ...”