“... colleague – as well as to a definite reluctance to rescue that colleague from his projected self-destruction. The story of murder in the quad – did Dover (then President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford) drive the vulnerable historian Trevor Aston to his grave? – has already become part of this book’s mythology. But, as far as I can see, Dover ...”

“... as he looks.’ But he was a living repository of nostalgia, and of the most stylish sort of self-pity; and these, if properly served up, can be a potent ingredient of literary popularity. Everyone has something to look back on, and to be sorry for themselves about; and Connolly acted as a focal point for the regrets and frustrations of his literary ...”

“... for almost everything that ails you. For the Jews, however, there is only a single very busy, self-important and fractious God. So it seemed to me when I was young. I was troubled by the unreliability of prayer, rather as one feels anxious about sending important letters to large organisations. Anne Frank is the only Jewish saint. I first read the diary ...”

“... to endorsing it. Front-line journalists usually have a high opinion of themselves, but Neil’s self-regard is loud, unique, indestructible. As he plods doggedly through his 11 years editing what he describes as one of the most influential newspapers on earth, he is continually dumbfounded by the sheer scale of his achievement. He became editor in October ...”

“... Outland in Willa Cather’s A Professor’s House). In literature, it is more delightful to lose a self than to gain one. In Play It As It Lays (1970) a guest at a good hotel glamorously descends into dementia: The room was painted purple, with purple Lurex threads in the curtains and bedspread. Because her mother had once told her that purple rooms could ...”

“... to fan mail (‘as many as two hundred letters a day’). The themes of these books – isolation, self-reliance, initiation – recur in his new memoir. So, too, do scenes of fantastic adventure and danger. The distinguishing feature of the new memoir – distinguishing it as a book for adults – is its depiction of sex, though this sex involves Paulsen’s ...”

“... a Social Science (1958), which stresses that Evans-Pritchard had given an account of a coherent, self-sustaining way of making sense of the world, one which ensured that belief in oracles would seem rational. These two interpretations imply two quite different answers to the question of whether understanding magic is compatible with believing in it. Thomas ...”

“... of one of the large Israeli parties or of Arafat’s PLO, but as an intellectual who speaks for self-determination through citizenship and equality for Jew and Arab. He is as much a threat to the established Arab order as he is to Israel. In Nazareth that night he introduced me to a polite but inquisitive crowd. I mentioned that the event was something of a ...”

“... People (1837), he surveys some two dozen texts, erudite and eccentric in turn, compiled by the self-taught in opposition to the academy, but popular and influential in their time. They range from the work of witty polemicists like Harvey Johnson, who in 1903 examined the failings of white society, asking whether whites could ever be trusted to govern ...”

“... may be fought. It is distinct from the law governing when wars may be fought (the jus ad bellum of self-defence and the UN Charter). Also known as the ‘laws of war’, international humanitarian law traces its origins to 1859, when the Swiss businessman Henri Dunant witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Solferino and initiated a movement that became the ...”

“... a more public-spirited, Confucian version of the Protestant ethic – to the 19th century’s self-congratulatory belief in the West’s ‘civilising mission’, Huntington and Harrison have discovered that the West can keep on congratulating itself – not this time on its exportable civilisation, but on its particular culture. The disparity between the ...”

“... even loyalty and affection, tend to career wildly out of control. Disorder is the norm; and self-understanding a bitter joke. If Roth’s characters discover that ‘the direction of life is toward incoherence,’ their creator appears to believe that the direction of writing is towards coherence. The slovenliness of living is matched by the severity of ...”

“... teleology, or accord such prominence to genealogy. Today even the toreros, once paragons of self-made Spanish manhood, mostly issue from a privileged handful of matador or rancher lineages. (Dynastic dementia: until recently, when a bull was smart enough to kill a man, the dam was slaughtered in an act of genetic misogyny.) But perhaps it’s because ...”

“... gradually to be learning to let it all hang out, and as the hippy pop of the 1960s gave way to the self-indulgent ‘progressive’ rock of the 1970s, he published a memorably terrible two-line tribute to Jefferson Airplane: The music comes and goes on the wind, Comes and goes on the brain. With the 1980s came The Passages of Joy, containing more free verse ...”

“... close ranks against outsiders. Hooper makes much of what he regards as tell-tale memory lapses and self-contradiction among those he interviewed, and of the mysterious disappearance of vital documents: most of Koprowski’s papers from this time had been ‘lost in a move’. He describes how he and fellow whistle-blowers were threatened with defamation writs ...”