“... The modern Republican Party was born of revolution. In the early 1960s, right-wing insurgents – self-consciously using the model of Communist cells – took over the GOP, repudiated the moderation of its leaders, among them President Eisenhower and the New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and built a formidable counter-establishment infrastructure that ...”

“... Like the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is the source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of freedom and fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas uses to characterise the relation between God and humanity.Dawkins, who is as ...”

“... that inspired Ebenezer Howard and his moral-religious moonshine about rehousing the nation in self-sufficient towns of 30,000 as to be almost fair to him. He digs out the many roots of Howard’s mission, notably its debt to Henry George’s single-tax campaign for land reform, popular in its time, forgotten today. He seems half aware that the garden city ...”

“... taken for granted, he can thank his awesome productivity, which he compares in his autobiography, Self-Consciousness (1989), to his psoriatic over-production of skin, and the sheer availability of his personal life and voice in novels, articles, television appearances and interviews. Though he is an intensely intellectual writer – his early novels undertake ...”

“... fantasists are too solipsistic, these figures are too relentlessly outward-looking for corrective self-scrutiny. Bernard, like Joe, loses the woman he loves, accused by her of being obsessed with rationality at the expense of emotion. McEwan’s first two novels thrived on the contrast between the scrupulous clarity of his writing and the resonant oddness of ...”

“... impulse moved them, that they were chasing a glimpse, however fleeting, of some confirming, self-ratifying idea of beauty, an equation to transcend all equations: some sense of perfect rightness, a feeling of the universe clicking into place. We can clearly see the romantic impulse at work, but when it is expressed through mathematics, most of us are ...”

“... very interestingly, a shift in Milton from an early belief in the plain intelligibility and ‘self-sufficiency’ of scripture to a later belief that scripture requires careful interpretation. With a nod to Derrida, he calls the factor of interpretation a ‘supplement’ and then concludes, with characteristic exaggeration, that respect for scripture as ...”

“... and Guinevere. There are storyettes about knights and foxes, and Paolo and Francesca, and a real self-parody of a framing story about a girl who fakes a set of male genitals with a tulip and two bulbs. There’s a recipe for Salsa di Pomodori (‘Serve on top of fresh spaghetti. Cover with rough new parmesan and cut basil. Raw emotion can be added ...”

“... and blindly worshipful’, but he was shrewdly advised by his general editor, Ernest Rhys, another self-made man of letters, and between them they correctly judged the deferential seriousness of their potential market. Rose finds it both understandable and impressive that ‘Dent was willing to invest in so many lengthy and intimidating classics: George ...”

“... many glasses of water. Even in the most apparently convivial of circumstances, Hastings maintained self-control, the root of the considerable personal authority which he was to exercise from his days at Westminster on (he had been a serious boy, and became Captain of the school in 1749). Westminster connections were important to Hastings, in one case damningly ...”

“... twin sisters, not doing well at school, seeking escape in solitary writing. Irritable, charmless, self-conscious and endlessly introspective, Nina was Auden’s frowning schoolgirl dying to be asked to stay. She particularly hoped for boys’ attention, but even girls’ friendship was hard to achieve. Nina didn’t like being a girl: she wanted to be a ...”

“... it has been business as usual. As the American scholar Larry Bartels pointed out, 90 per cent of self-identified Republicans voted for Trump; 89 per cent of citizens who think of themselves as Democrats voted for Clinton. It isn’t surprising either that after two presidential terms for one party, there was plenty of anti-incumbent sentiment (Clinton was ...”

“... nothing special in the animal kingdom: we have no immortal soul; there is no essential human ‘self’; our thoughts and emotions are the product of electrochemical impulses which can, in principle, be modelled by the formal problem-solving rules we call algorithms; our bodily frames and mental capacities have evolved over time and there is nothing fixed ...”

“... all, fantastic analogy is the ploy developed by Dickens to match people’s strangeness and self-contradiction.’ In his novels, we look to ‘features of physique or habits of deportment’ to reveal character. Mr Merdle, the corrupt financier in Little Dorrit, appears to condemn himself, long before anyone else has, by the manner in which he greets ...”

“... I had drifted into doctoral research with a 2.1 from Cambridge and an unclassified O-Level in self-confidence. My friends from university, many headed for work in London, had initially been sceptical. One of them, later the deputy prime minister, worried that academic pay was crap and I’d have to read everything. Besides, decent posts were scarce. But I ...”