“... recorded in earlier volumes. The distinctions include cowardice, sottishness, corpulence, self-identification with the deity and a failure to rise from the dead after an undertaking to do so. The individuals thus branded will still apparently figure in the new edition, along with old favourites like ...”

“... South-East Europe along supposedly ethnic lines, based on the Woodrow Wilson principle of national self-determination. That these same treaties codified the rights of minorities was only logical, since it was the creation of these nation-states on the basis of dominant ethnic groups that had the instant fleet of establishing such ‘minorities’. Many of ...”

“... Death centres on the confrontation between Danton and Robespierre. Danton’s opposition to the self-perpetuating violence of the Terror links him with earlier opponents of absolutism, while Robespierre’s insistence that terror is needed in order to establish the reign of virtue seems to anticipate the claims of later tyrants to be mere instruments of ...”

“... novel of sensibility was the wasting of a morbid ‘finer spirit’ who could discover no second self in the world. (The genre always leaned toward epistle and monologue because the reader was required to become that self.) Yet the style of feeling which had supported the ambitions and consoled the anxiety of three ...”

“... a concept of property which was ‘social’ rather than state or private, and a Gramscian view of self-managing civil society – as well as a commitment to ‘bourgeois’ liberties like political pluralism and parliamentary democracy. This was the elusive ‘Third Way’ – the alternative script which had been accumulating Communist rejection slips since ...”

“... they were built to sustain have cracked and crumbled. The most influential modern biography of the self-styled ‘Louis the Great’, Pierre Goubert’s Louis XIV and Twenty Million Frenchmen, presents the King as a man whose thirst for glory led the vast majority of his subjects into a condition of ‘primitive, anarchic wretchedness’. Modern historians ...”

“... to memorise a collection of words that included four terms of praise – ‘adventurous’, ‘self-confident’, ‘independent’ and ‘persistent’. A second group was asked to memorise a similar list except that the four positive words were replaced by ‘reckless’, ‘conceited’, ‘aloof’ and ‘stubborn’. Both groups then moved on to an ...”

“... O.K. ... Just as Grace Paley the pacifist and political activist is never polemical, preachy or self-righteous in her fiction, so Grace Paley the feminist is unpredictable: an artist, and not a propagandist. Of course, the predominant concerns of the Collected Stories are with women’s issues. Virtually all the stories are narrated from a woman’s ...”

“... can call up, more or less at will, a would-be disarming cuteness of address, a somewhat chilled, self-loving geniality. Salinger reserves his cuteness for his fiction, Updike for his non-fiction. Indeed, Updike’s literary-professional demeanour, hugely prolific, well-mannered, prize-conscious, ever ready to grant interviews, write prefaces and ...”

“... Bainbridge owns up to making £35,000 and Michael Holroyd regards £70,000 as a decent haul. Will Self can manage on anything between £40,000 and £80,000. At the bottom end of the scale there are poets who would happily settle for a regular 12 grand. Writers with film and mass-media connections – Hanif Kureishi, for example – don ‘t of course tell us ...”

“... Yet he is wakeful, too – intelligent, droll, social, especially good at capturing snobbery’s self-grooming. He has a beautifully loitering instinct for form and sentence: his novels never hustle themselves to conclusion, or to heavily obvious theme. The Spell flows with all these qualities, but is not a very ambitious or driven book (and differs sharply ...”

“... paternalist faction at odds with free market economics: it was a discussion group that encouraged self-critical debate within the party, its membership deliberately not confined to any single position. Its founding members included proto-Thatcherite free marketeers like Enoch Powell and Angus Maude alongside consensual modernisers sceptical of market-based ...”

“... implausible plotting only makes the act of employing a surrogate seem all the more arbitrary and self-indulgent. Each time the camera lingers lovingly on another tasteful detail of the family’s upper middle-class home, we wonder whether we are expected to fear for the heroine or resent her.Gloria Erlich’s new study of Edith Wharton also traces the dire ...”

“... with extramission and loss, owes something to a childhood metaphysics about growth and the self. It is described very beautifully in a discussion about Hamlet and his dead father in the episode of Ulysses set in the National Library:—As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and ...”

“... a ‘likeable’ guy. (Obama gets 61 per cent.) On television he projects a strange combination of self-satisfaction and an uneasiness about dealing with others who might doubt his unerring rectitude. The only well-known anecdotes about his bland life of acquiring wealth are both cruel: leading a pack of bullies at his prep school, personally cutting off the ...”