“... and political and religious groupings, in many cases evidently motivated by personal resentment or self-interest, and it’s hard to imagine that The Divine Comedy would be an easy book to publish today. Reading Marco Santagata’s fascinating new biography, the reader is soon forced to acknowledge that one of the cornerstones of Western literature, a poem ...”

“... reaction against the idea that new money is more comfortable with new art may have helped. If the self-made man in 1870 was expected to buy Millais or Millet, their still wealthier successors (characterised by Hook as ‘rough-hewn moguls’) would be tempted into a world of more durable as well as princely taste – ‘princely’, because princes had a ...”

“... is that in the case of Palestine we deliberately and rightly decline to accept the principle of self-determination. If the present inhabitants were consulted they would unquestionably give an anti-Jewish verdict.’ That was later echoed by Churchill. In 1937 he met Jabotinsky, and took up his opposition to a second partition of Palestine into Jewish and ...”

“... Liberal peoples, who are naturally indifferent to imperial glory, can justly wage wars of self-defence on ‘outlaw’ states. The synergy between the aims of the US State Department, human rights advocates and military humanists grew more intense after 9/11. Philip Bobbitt, counsellor to several American administrations, and muse to Blair and ...”

“... emigration’. So it was that long after the war an aristocratic Wehrmacht clung to the self-serving myth that the crimes and excesses of the SS had nothing to do with them or their mission. Bora’s own excuse is also a familiar one:My aggressiveness … is a reaction. Against the wrongs done to our Fatherland after the Great War, against those ...”

“... to these heroes, and the ostensible nonchalance of his tone is partly a mimicry of their self-promoting unconcern. An abundant war-literature recording persons who would once have belonged to the class of unsung heroes has come into existence since Byron’s time, neutralising part of his complaint. The common soldier’s point of view is well ...”

“... and he wants exclusive physical love. One thing they do agree about: ‘I’m not going to be self-sacrificing,’ she says. Nor will he be, as he showed in Part One. There is an important consequence of this. If you are not going to be self-sacrificing and others aren’t either, then the condition of life with people ...”

“... Her dashing derivative manner is hardly more than the function of a permanent hopeful high self-consciousness. But its falsity, though innocent, is unpromising: so much so that there is a curiously strong relief when at moments the Sandra style breaks down, and another voice – though still not the novelist’s – makes itself heard. Invariably this ...”

“... of the mid-19th century. But their work takes it for granted that English history is in effect self-contained: the American experiences of Paine and Cobbett are left out of the story. The land, England within its ‘natural’ boundaries, is ultimately the key to everything. Rupert Brooke did not suppose that some far corner of a foreign field would be for ...”

“... the purity and lucidity of one’s motives (mine are worthy of Benjamin Franklin) one asks one’s self what one is doing in that galère.’ Michael Anesko’s strikingly authoritative ‘Friction with the Market’: Henry James and the Profession of Authorship gives a good many detailed and salutary answers in its essential account of exactly what James was ...”

“... and guffaw. What a weirdo. Shall we just say that my childish heart turned then to adamant? That self-protection meant fixing one’s eyes on blankness and acting dead? When I began thinking of myself as a lesbian – not so long afterwards, really – the age-old stereotype of the female homosexual as doomed misfit, lost in a dark and sterile world of ...”

“... My​ military career was on the comic side.’ Self-protective irony was Ian Watt’s chosen register when describing his wartime experience some twenty years later. That experience began when the 24-year-old Lieutenant Watt was posted, along with the rest of the 5th Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment, to the Far East in the winter of 1941 ...”

“... Lev was disgusted with himself every time he had sex. All too easily he transferred his self-loathing to the object of his lust. Women were filthy. Yearning for purity, he whored compulsively. He tried to be good, helping the peasants on his country estate, even running a school for them, but in no time at all he would be chasing women again. Even ...”

“... he added, to view ‘Scots abroad as ambitious and successful and the Scots at home as self paralysed’. No such paralysis for Lloyd, who did well down south and further afield, editing Time Out and the New Statesman and working for the Financial Times as Labour editor, Eastern Europe editor and Moscow bureau chief. With the EU – ‘the other ...”

“... in my life I am able to stand up to, or with, a man of my own age whose strength of purpose and self-discipline are at least as great as mine.’ V says she has an extraordinary mind: ‘You think things right through, by prisming them through yourself. Your mind is ten times as good as mine.’ And yet, there will be no dancing. When she moves in with ...”