“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... You’ve​ got to love Zadie Smith. When The Fraud arrived I did what no self-respecting reviewer should ever do. I flipped the book open and peeked at a random chapter. I know, I know. Never peek. It can spoil Christmas. But sometimes it’s just too tempting, and sometimes knowing what’s under the wrapping paper can make it even more fun to tear it off when the big day comes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he was treated multiple times for alcohol and drug addiction, and he now speaks openly and self-effacingly about his struggles with mental health. These events have shaped O’Sullivan’s life, and he has returned to them in profiles, TV documentaries and two previous memoirs. His first, Ronnie (2003), told the story of his startling rise to ...”

“... identity, anxious and even guilty about his enthusiasms and pleasures, searching for a singular self.’ It can be a dangerous game, but investing in other selves, in less tribal ways of accessing your ‘authenticity’, may be a stylist’s chief prerogative. The heroes of prose fiction are not merely good at doing voices (as Dickens was, on the page and ...”

“... funny.I am not a good weeper when people die.There is no false modesty here, more a persistent self-reckoning. As she also liked to say, ‘there are things that I have accomplished and things I failed to do.’Segal’s accomplishments, over eighty years, have long been acknowledged, even if they remain for the most part under the radar. That her books ...”

“... to point to an imaginative hinterland in a detective’s mind, and there’s an element of wry self-reference here. A character in Cover Her Face makes the point: ‘The cultured cop! I thought they were peculiar to detective novels. Congratulations!’ Dalgliesh is at his most predictable in his supposed eccentricity.James would not have claimed the ...”

“... admirably researched and written, and quietly subversive. It asks how much deceit – and how much self-deception on the part of the global anti-apartheid movement – might be revealed by a closer look at the liberation struggle and the dawn of the ‘New South Africa’. Quite a lot, it turns out. Outsiders have been eager to find a moral lesson in the ...”

“... of the Middle Ages. Civilisation recovered, but growth in a world of limits was ultimately self-defeating. The prosperity of the 16th century soon gave way to famine, drought, war and plague. It was only after modern technology unlocked the productive capacities of the earth that society was able to escape this cycle of expansion, crisis and ...”

“... in turning profits but in growing his business and acquiring ever more novel tech companies. His self-aggrandising ‘mine is bigger than yours’ attitude impressed both Trump and Mohammed bin Salman. Barber recounts a meeting between Son and the soon-to-be US president at which Trump showed Son how to replicate his signature combover. Son and bin Salman ...”