“... heroes: the High Style. To evolve an exalted voice appropriate to the 20th century has been the self-imposed challenge of his work. It began with The Adventures of Augie March (1953), at times very shakily: for all its marvels, Augie March, like Henderson the Rain King, often resembles a lecture on destiny fed through a Thesaurus of low-life patois. Herzog ...”

“... would have been the eradication of village poverty and unemployment through individual and social self-reliance. The writings show a Gandhi who runs against the Independence-current of modern Indian history.Raghavan Iyer has approached the writings by presenting them around a number of themes. For better or worse, this separates them at once from the ...”

“... revelation of these letters is that Larkin, the above-it-all curmudgeon and recluse, the arch-self-deprecator, was in truth nursing a champ-sized fixation on matters of literary rank – a fixation perhaps Maileresque in its immensity and scope. The settings, we might say, are different, drabber, Hull not Brooklyn, and so on, but the ache for supremacy is ...”

“... Spain. The Spanish galleon is in turn captured by a French ship, the captain of which, a noble and self-sacrificing individual named Déterville, falls instantly and desperately in love with her but, concealing his passion, looks after her with tender care on their homeward journey (which is also a time-journey, for we skip two centuries) to France. Meanwhile ...”

“... display of intelligence is beginning to be seen as presumptuous. So rampant have utilitarian and self-satisfied populist attitudes to art become that the very idea of devoting air waves or column inches to an aesthetic view of things seems almost offensive. When, in a Listener attack on Mainly for Pleasure in 1980, Hans Keller asked, ‘is unbilled car-radio ...”

“... dismay and were duly shocked. But there is a limit to how patronising I can be about our youthful self-deceit. When Richard Neville’s book starts to tell the story of the Oz trial, it is hard not to become engaged, or re-engaged. All the old astonishment and enragement at the idiocy, time-wasting and viciousness of the law and its officers comes back as ...”

“... speculating about the nature of society as making positive suggestions for its improvement. The self-contradictions and simultaneous embracing of conflicting viewpoints that served him so well in other fields were not what was wanted here. Anyone whose acquaintance with him was confined to the material made available to us in Mason and Wokler’s Political ...”

“... is calmly presented to the reader as a typical middle-class hippy of those years: irresponsible, self-indulgent, dishonest and not very bright; yet at the same time we are not openly invited to shake our fists or hiss. Compare Dickens’s treatment of Mrs Jelly-by in Bleak House. As high-minded neglecters of their own children the two women resemble each ...”

“... out of everything we can’t or wont know about ourselves. But then Dracula is a dream, multiple, self-contradicting, hovering. He doesn’t show up in mirrors because he is himself a mirror, ready to reflect a whole hodgepodge of fears and desires. He drinks blood, preys on women; converts men to insect-eaters; he is the undead, a travesty of the ...”

“... recently that his island-state had ‘unwritten its own history’ in accordance with ‘a self-protective incuriosity about origins’. Tasmania’s origins lay in an act of genocidal conquest and a penal experiment, both of which were so recent and so omnipresent in their effect as to make recollection intolerable. There are certainly striking ...”

“... girls with the means to achieve something like Unity of Being; Moore, accurate and quietly self-assertive as usual, merely says it enabled her to have what she wanted. The vague shape of what she wanted was already present in her mind and habits, and the college years allowed it to become more definite. She was already writing poetry, but it is in her ...”

“... said to connote authoritarianism; even better, his brother Alexander, a naturalist, geographer and self-consciously anti-colonialist explorer, remains popular in Latin America to this day (Cuba has a large Alejandro de Humboldt National Park). In Germany itself, Alexander is held up in popular science and children’s books as a forerunner of climate ...”

“... 2001. Whatever the reasons, everyone agreed it was a disaster: the party soon began its routine of self-abasement and mutual recrimination. Yet this wasn’t simply a Labour wipeout. The party retained and won mayoralties, and expanded its reach in Manchester, aided by a phenomenally popular mayor, Andy Burnham. Preston, long regarded as a test bed for the ...”

“... against the politician whose ‘vanity’ turns the pursuit of power into a ‘purely personal self-intoxication’, who strives ‘for the glamorous semblance of power, rather than for actual power’. And yet, because ‘striving for power is one of the driving forces of all politics, there is no more harmful distortion of political force than the ...”

“... the Clutter Image Rating (2008), a diagnostic tool designed by Frost and Steketee to replace vague self-definitions of hoarding with a more objective measure. The CIR consists of images of different interiors – kitchen, bedroom, living room – which are progressively filled with objects. In the first picture of the living room the space is more or less ...”