“... Ashburnham held the many rare manuscripts that had been donated to the nation by the antiquarian Robert Cotton, as well as the treasures of the royal manuscript collections. The flames from a fireplace had caught on the wooden mantelpiece and spread to the wainscoting. Hapless librarians were throwing water on the blaze; the city fire engines were nowhere to ...”

“... One is the principled, compassionate statesman who lays down his life for his convictions in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All Seasons. The other, more or less diametrically opposed, is the zealot and vindictive persecutor of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, who takes savage delight in flogging heretics. The attempt to claim, for one agenda or another, this ...”

“... supportive, Yiddish and English-speaking parents, growing up in a tough but precariously self-respecting community which would later become a black ghetto, Podhoretz was the star pupil in the local high school, where white students felt threatened by gangs of teenaged blacks. In his 1963 essay ‘My Negro Problem – and Ours’, this early ...”

“... the comic and the adventurer, were diligently cultivated by Coryate – he was a great self-publicist – and both are expressed in his best-known book, Coryats Crudities, published in 1611. The Crudities gives an exhaustive account of his travels in Europe, but his long peregrinations in the East are more sparsely documented. His last extant ...”

“... created a more fictional character than the researching “I” in my doctorate,’ he wrote, ‘a self that begins in pretended ignorance and then slowly arrives at knowledge, not at all in the fitful, chancy way I myself arrived at it, but step by step, proof by proof, according to the rules.’ The trilogy opens with Bänkpress (1988), so far untranslated ...”

“... afraid above all of being involved,’ Berlin once told a friend. Impatient with this legend of self-effacement, Pasternak’s sister Lydia (who lived in Oxford) moaned: ‘His present power over literature, in fact over everything in every field, is at times almost disastrous, I do not know how he contrives to hold everybody in such constant awe and fear ...”

“... account as a complex if partial portrait of a man: incomplete, tendentious, unreliable, at times self-contradictory – but whose biography isn’t? Julius Caesar emerges from Suetonius’ portrait (as from other sources, including his own writings) as a man who liked to move fast and break things, who possessed both the means and the inclination to conquer ...”

“... stutter and acute psoriasis, which he wrote about with bemused, clinical aplomb in his memoir Self-Consciousness (1989), he seemed to defy age and attrition, remaining nimble and smooth on the page, his brain a well-oiled Leica. With the exception of the still generative Joyce Carol Oates, a frequent pen-pal in the letters (and presiding grande dame of ...”

“... separated the theatres, one behind the other, on a vast paved piazza. But something there is, as Robert Frost says, that does not like a wall. From any angle, these schemes suggested disguised factories for making some plebeian product – meat pies, perhaps – inexplicably thrusting out of the harbour, the same problem that had inspired the soon to be ...”

“... stars, headed by the Nigerian president, Olusegun Obasanjo, the US deputy secretary of state, Robert Zoellick, the British international development secretary, Hilary Benn, and others. In less than a week, government and rebels were compelled to come to a comprehensive agreement. In the late afternoon of 5 May, after a final 20-hour negotiating ...”

“... slopes. Buñuel points the camera at a goat about to risk the next precarious step, as though self-consciously for the camera, before it loses its footing and falls. He also finds a donkey being stung to death by bees. (Sour honey was the main export from the region.) The voiceover, accompanied by a piece of Brahms, announces that a group of shepherds in ...”

“... misreading is not uncommon. The novel is seen as the archetypal Puritan adventure story, a self-sufficient fiction which transcends the controversies Defoe addresses in his journalism. This is rather like saying that TV programmes such as Castaway and Big Brother tell us nothing about the social moments that created them. Although some recent scholars ...”

“... of the European Union since the end of the Cold War, and occasion for more or less unqualified self-congratulation, has left one inconspicuous thorn in the palm of Brussels. The furthest east of all the EU’s new acquisitions, even if the most prosperous and democratic, has been a tribulation to its establishment, one that neither fits the uplifting ...”

“... to serve as a model for the nations of the world. That lies in its genetic programme.’ Self-satisfaction is scarcely unfamiliar in Europe. But the contemporary mood is something different: an apparently illimitable narcissism, in which the reflection in the water transfigures the future of the planet into the image of the beholder. What explains ...”

“... the Kent coast – Thanet Earth is a virtuous producer.Thirty Thanet Earths could bring Britain to self-sufficiency in ‘salad’, but even if you regard that as a triumph, there are snags. For one thing, new glasshouses would have to be on or near the same latitude (approx 51 degrees north), as they are in Holland, to make the most of natural light. For ...”