“... In particular, he praises Baldwin’s careful fostering of Labour, which was done partly from self-interest (socialists made easier targets than Liberals) but partly also from a disinterested desire to provide a constitutional context for inevitable social change. Certainly, however culpable Baldwin may have been of ‘putting party before country’ in ...”

“... rather than a succession of brilliantly-lit set-pieces, but the whole thing has such extraordinary self-assurance that complaints soon die away.That calm eccentric boldness is, for reasons I can’t pretend to know, a stylistic habit of the present moment, but only of some women writers. Perhaps they have rediscovered and modernised kinds of attention, kinds ...”

“... every weekend and becomes an urban beach.The story of the M8 starts with the Bruce Report in 1945 (Robert Bruce was Glasgow’s chief engineer). It is remembered for two startling proposals: first, the destruction of almost all of the city centre and its architecturally significant buildings, including the School of Art, Kelvingrove Art Gallery, the Mitchell ...”

“... In​ How to be Topp (1954), Nigel Molesworth unveils ‘the Molesworth Self-Adjusting Thank-you Letter’. The sender is instructed to strike out the words which don’t apply, before thanking the present-buyer for theTrain. Tractor. germ gun. kite.delicious present. sweets.Space pistol. Toy socks.The letter ends with a blank space to be filled in with a date to remind the recipient when the next present is due ...”

“... also skirts the actual teaching of the subject in the universities. Nor is he convinced by Robert Crawford’s claim that English literature as an academic field was ‘invented’ in the universities of Enlightenment Scotland, where in 1762 Hugh Blair became the first incumbent of the Regius Chair of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at Edinburgh. According ...”

“... of Irish labourers. The policy reflected a moral belief that aid should promote self-reliance and distinguish the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving’ poor. As Trevelyan explained, ‘Our plan is not to give the meal away, but to sell it.’By March 1847 public works schemes employed more than 700,000 people, whose wages supported ...”

“... October 1920’. However, as Schwarcz observes, political rehabilitation ‘is not the same as self-rehabilitation’. Zhang was anxious both to justify himself to himself, and also to be remembered as a philosopher. He was, in her words, ‘arrogant’ and convinced that he was ‘the greatest philosopher in 20th-century China.’ His ambitions on this ...”

“... at the age of 31. Faulks also suggests that they lived and died in the shadow of war. This is self-evidently so with Hillary, while it can be plausibly argued that the slaughter of the Great War was a determining element in Wood’s background and that the Cold War contributed to Wolfenden’s early death. The trio differed in their sexuality – Wood was ...”

“... though the occasions have passed. Shaw, like Keller, is aggressive, provocative, an unashamed self-presenter (in Shaw’s case self-promoter too, though of course not as musician); both are outrageously biased and flamboyantly exhibitionistic. The differences are that Shaw is wide-ranging, intellectually ...”

“... unshy predictions as to the revolutionising of American letters. Kerouac was never one to be self-effacing, but neither was he slow to praise the fluttering genius of his pals. ‘By virtue of my youth and enthusiasm and fire,’ Jack writes to Sebastian, of their friend Ian/Yann, he has been reborn: perhaps! But by virtue of his weary knowledge, his ...”

“... a moral turn, not least inside the Dutch Reformed Church, which fatally undermined the regime’s self-confidence? And was not that turn inspired by the example of Mandela in the ultimate non-violent situation, banged up on Robben Island? What about those equally startling velvet revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, or more recently in Burma? Most ...”

“... The​ Soft Machine drummer, Robert Wyatt, his Cockney tenor cracking with fervour, once sang:I’m nearly five foot seven tallI like to smoke and drink and ballI’ve got a yellow suit that’s made by Pamand every day I like an egg and some teabut most of all I like to talk about me.The American poet Wallace Stevens liked his tea – he took to it in connoisseurship and prudence, ‘imported tea’ every afternoon, ‘with some little tea wafers’, partly in order to ease himself off martinis (Elsie, his ‘Pam’, disapproved of his drinking) – but otherwise everything is different ...”

“... foreknowledge, fragmentary but direct, of events in the world before her birth, and the neonate Robert, in Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk, not only remembers being born (someone ‘clamping his head and wrenching his neck from side to side’) but the preceding state of bliss – ‘never the whole thing again, the whole warm thing all around ...”

“... set trauma on a new course. And psychoanalysis reciprocated the favour. Not only did analysts like Robert Jay Lifton and Bruno Bettelheim help construct the Holocaust as the paradigmatic case of a traumatic event that could not fail to leave ‘a trace on the individual and collective memory’, they also developed a clinical entity, ‘survivor syndrome’ or ...”

“... There were fellow poets such as Felicia Hemans, Tom Moore, Samuel Rogers, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack Bannister, George Colman the younger, various Kembles, the ...”