“... contrary to his image he spent much of his teens, twenties and early thirties on a determinedly self-improving trajectory: an apprenticeship in TV repair in Leith, then an electrical engineering course in London; clerical work for Hackney council, then a computing MSc; a successful spell as a North London property developer; then better council work back in ...”

“... that the 30 per cent who held out had ‘better coping skills, were more socially competent, self-assertive, trustworthy, dependable and academically successful’. It’s this willingness to open up the expected format that makes Murder at Wrotham Hill so compelling about its time and the attitudes of those living in it, rather than simply a voyeuristic ...”

“... halted between green mountains and blue sea … He writes to anyone, he calls nobody, to his own self he writes, in himself forgets, and is redeemed, becoming again me[*] There is no question of automatic writing here or even of Romantic inspiration, but those ghosts of literary otherness never quite go away. In this early work – written in the 1940s ...”

“... praised through me, the more limited the female intellect is believed to be.’ No doubt the self-deprecation is mostly literary convention, but it feels a long way from crushing flint with teeth. And what do either of those women share with Moderata Fonte in 16th-century Venice, whose chatty polemic on The Worth of Women is subtitled ‘Wherein is ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... bars of soap. A directive and an assignment. The reading, stuck between tawdry and kooky, pulp and self-help. ‘Ramon George’ and ‘Right Guard’. ‘Deodorant’ – that must mean God-given – and ‘Sneyd’ – if not the mis-written ‘Sneya’ that bedevils the fellow’s hapless Canadian passport. The weird, badly wearing (not so much ‘quite ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the ‘inflexible etiquette’ of form (‘Misguided Angel’) with the besieged contemporary self. Ford is the cartoonist of the soul’s adventures, but the cartoons have a deadly underside of seriousness: I lay emptied as a fallen Leaf until startled awake by a blinding flash Of dry lightning, and the onset of this terrible thirst. (‘Twenty-Twenty ...”

“... attitudes to these and other related matters are based on selfish fantasies and expressed in self-serving cant. His plan is to blow them away with the breath of common sense. To answer the question asked in his title he begins at the beginning: since we attach so much importance to the idea, what, in fact, constitutes a work of art? It’s a newfangled ...”

“... for the country remained his line. He was not much of a joiner. He did sign up with the ‘self-consciously elitist’ and purportedly non-political Anglo-German Fellowship in 1935, but, Kershaw writes, he was not one of its more active members. He had no connection with any of the pro-German groupuscules fired by rabid anti-semitism or inspired by ...”

“... of the it virtue. And he is also right in Chapter 12 when he argues that Jefferson’s concept of self-evident moral truths can most plausibly be construed as the adoption of certain positions of Thomas Reid. What he then proceeds to ignore is that if what Reid asserted and argued for is true, then Huleheson’s moral philosophy is false, and vice ...”

“... treated it more decently – as he does elsewhere in the novel. In 1964 John Fowles published ‘a self-portrait in ideas’ called The Aristos, of which he has said: ‘I hate to think of the awful pages of bad philosophy that would be in my novels if I hadn’t written that. ‘Perhaps time will find a similar use for Mantissa: at the moment, there’s ...”

“... patron of the Ursulines or the Cineclub de Madrid, a line which divides revolutionary art from self-indulgent political gesturing? Wisely, Buñuel managed to steer clear of any of the more violent Surrealist events himself. While he was shooting L’Age d’Or, the lads went on a rumble one night to turn over a night-club which had intrepidly named itself ...”

“... the city, airily treating it, along with the rest of collective behaviour, as part of a Newtonian self-equilibrating system. Thus the city was created and held together by each man going about his business of buying and selling, among other commodities, human labour, either his own or somebody else’s. There is, indeed, much truth in this notion, for, as ...”

“... man: Thomas Cromwell. He is similarly fixed in his methods. Now, as always, Elton believes in the self-sufficiency of the record. All the historian is required to do is to approach the evidence with an open mind, study it faithfully, and write up his results clearly: ‘that is how historical knowledge should advance, and that is how as a rule it does.’ All ...”