“... lost his father’s religious framework as a young man but read avidly in theology, philosophy and self-improving literature, searching for another set of values to shape his existence. He found one in the duty of work – for its own sake, but also in order to understand the underlying order of the world and ‘discern its harmonies’, as he put it in a ...”

“... In those files, as I found from my own Polish dossier, it’s not only a younger half-forgotten self that you meet. It is also an unrecognisable stranger – yourself, as others have seen you. For nearly thirty years, hundreds of thousands of people have been reading their secret police files, the records of surveillance, denunciation and manipulation ...”

“... the emigrant intellectuals who pepper Scottish history as ‘red Scots’: ‘cosmopolitan, self-avowedly “enlightened” and, given a chance, authoritarian, expanding into and exploiting greater and more bountiful fields than their own country could provide’. The ‘black Scots’ who remained were ‘demotic, parochial, sensitive about community ...”

“... next to people who had gone to convent school and Rada, nice people but different, loosely self-conscious and super-educated and social in a way the Northerners had never seen. I met Alan Sillitoe in the 1990s, and he was still shy, still standing at the edge of the party. But it was Storey who most powerfully understood the price of the journey, the ...”

“... between Presbyterians and Independents, the former desiring a national church and the latter self-governing congregations; then an explosion of exotically named sects – Ranters, Seekers, Muggletonians, Grindletonians; and in America the showdown between the ruling Calvinists and ‘Antinomian’ dissidents. Cries of blasphemy and heresy arose on all ...”

“... remarks, ‘Life, like the police, enjoys beating people now and again.’ These people tend to be self-effacing – one mother, asked whether her daughter is studying at Harvard or Yale, replies, ‘Another one,’ unwilling to attempt the tricky pronunciation of Bryn Mawr. Asked if her daughter’s subject is law or medicine, she lowers her eyes when she ...”

“... claimed to have spent five years analysing himself (though it’s hard to believe his intransigent self-sufficiency could have tolerated such a novitiate). He thought of the predicament of British musical culture in psychoanalytic terms, noticing an oscillation in attitude between excessive deference to the grandeur of the Austro-German tradition and defensive ...”

“... rise to fame and fortune: the people who worked with him or for him were too weak or too self-interested to blow the whistle.Some had good reason. Little blame can be attached to the politicians who cultivated Maxwell, such as Neil Kinnock. How could any Labour leader afford to alienate the owner of the biggest Labour-supporting newspaper? As for the ...”

“... special operators from the War on Terror years have specialised in a different genre: the business self-help manual. These former military officers feel that a career spent planning deadly missions and leading men into messy wars makes them uniquely qualified to offer ‘Battle-Tested Strategies for Creating Successful Organisations and Inspiring Extraordinary ...”

“... religion that combined Hindu and Muslim features. They also supported demands for greater Indian self-government.Brahmoism was a fractious movement, but it agreed on viewing Bengal’s traditional form of religion as priestly fussiness. Brahmos equated what was becoming known in the 19th century as Hinduism with an idealised upper-caste family life, which ...”

“... Australia, created by a Labor government ‘to help the sons and daughters of the working man’), self-education (he called his intellectual autobiography A blacksmith looks at a university) and afforestation. Three of his children passed through the University but the fourth struggled at school and was exiled (‘Dad didn’t believe in failure’) up to a ...”

“... in school. The Bolshevik platform before the Russian Revolution had stressed national rights and self-determination, and many non-Russian radicals such as Stalin were attracted to Lenin’s group for this reason. The early Bolshevik leaderships included large numbers of Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, Poles, Balts, Jews and others. Immediately after taking ...”

“... of being an outsider, and this was the key to her success. Being female was part of the parvenu self-image but so, too, was being lower middle-class: ‘In the eyes of the “wet” Tory establishment I was not only a woman, but “that woman”, someone not just of a different sex, but of a different class, a person with an alarming conviction that the ...”

“... in an inflationary style of uneasy melodramatic overstatement which veers between confession and self-justification. The tone sometimes becomes strenuously entertaining, as when ‘the trains quicken, and the plot thickens,’ or when a beautiful young Greek proposes to her on an acquaintance of a few hours, and she locks herself in a ship’s ...”