“... elegance was achieved, it now emerges, only after numerous reshapings; Roussel quarried its seven self-contained chapters from a vast, sprawling draft almost twice as long as the published version. This involved discarding the further adventures of characters, such as the sybil Felicity, who nonetheless appear in the final text, as well as a number of wholly ...”

“... argue that when his client was appointed commander of Central Bosnia in spring 1992, he found a self-styled citizens’ army, lacking both technical equipment and discipline. He is fond of telling the story of a man who sold his tractor and bought an anti-aircraft gun, which he used as he pleased from his front garden. What the former Chief Prosecutor of ...”

“... of the quest story, brought to literary respectability by Raymond Chandler, has collapsed into self-parody and a decadent excess of style. A cinema of ghosts represented by the cruel distance between The Big Sleep as realised by Howard Hawks in 1946, from a script by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman, and the sad remake, written and ...”

“... have been the first to think musically about punctuation. The eminent 18th-century grammarian Robert Lowth had compared punctuation marks to rests in music. Period, colon, semi-colon and comma are ‘in the same proportion to one another’, Lowth noted, as semi-breve, minim, crotchet and quaver.The signature of Nelly’s performance as a narrator is the ...”

“... development. Unlike modern estates, which tend to be tacked onto existing conurbations, it was self-sufficient. It had schools, shops, pubs and a large church. ‘It was fantastic,’ Whitley says. ‘Well-made houses, big gardens, plenty of open spaces, football pitches. The buses from Cammell Laird to the docks used to flood the estate.’Forty years ...”

“... which Akerman chain-smokes, bringing her palm to cover her face each time she inhales. She is both self-assured and adolescent: she plays with her watchstrap and her shoe and looks rather disengaged. Her answers are straightforward. To the interviewer’s question about her use of an all-woman crew for Jeanne Dielman, she answers that girls often don’t get ...”

“... through a lorgnette.’ The actors suffered from ‘professional jealousy’, he noted, more than self-pity. ‘Not one of them had a good word to say for the other.’ The backbiting was, it seemed, infectious – since Browning joined the bad-mouthing. He told the Los Angeles Times that he could never tell what his freaks might do. ‘Most of them are ...”

“... Nonconformism and a much more radical local proletariat. They demanded incorporation – municipal self-government – and electoral reform. The pact broke down in the Bull Ring riots of 1839, when shopkeepers and factory owners supported the violent suppression of Chartist demonstrations by the Metropolitan Police, bussed in for the occasion. For the next ...”

“... second sense. Morgan begins with what she calls ‘arguments about exclusion before the 1960s’. Self-styled Anglo-Saxon New England gentlemen researching their heroic freedom-loving ancestors, using a narrow range of hard-to-find and closely held records, were followed by more sociologically diverse white ethnic groups whose members formed their own descent ...”

“... was crucial. This verbal habit of the King’s was presumably the attempt of a nervous and self-conscious man to prevent the conversation from flagging – always a danger in chats with the monarch since the subject is never certain whether he or she is expected to reply or when. The onset of the King’s mania delivered him from ...”

“... MacDonald, as if the authentic Bowie had revealed himself at last. But the concept of an authentic self, slippery at the best of times, has almost no purchase at all when it comes to Bowie. ‘I’m very happy with Ziggy, I think he was a very successful character and I think I played him very well, but I’m glad I’m me now,’ he says earnestly in Cracked ...”

“... of resident reviewers in contemporary broadsheets – superficiality, over-confident judgments, self-importance, puffing – and Wilson was not as exempt from these as it might please us to think. Nonetheless, this platform made him a person of consequence in literary New York. Though scarcely more than thirty, he was already being teasingly referred to as ...”

“... as time went on the atmosphere became almost strained, though with Willie his usual smiling vague self. At the finish the madame was insistent that we should not all leave together so we separately filtered out into an empty Bond Street with me wondering if this at last was ‘living’. 7 July. It’s perhaps the quality of my acquaintance but I have yet to ...”

“... were organised into parties with uniformed paramilitary wings. They operated in what the historian Robert Paxton has called an ‘uneasy but effective collaboration’ with traditional elites, which wanted to maintain order and crush the left. Fascism, from this perspective, was born of particular social conditions that are unlikely to recur in the same ...”

“... Europe and the US, showing it won’t shirk from a staggering level of violence and grievous self-inflicted wounds to further its leaders’ aims. It would have shrugged off the emigration of a few hundred thousand disaffected young people, and the deaths and maiming of tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of Russians, as the necessary price of ...”