“... unconnected; the honeymooners’ prospects don’t look good. Tarquin himself, necessarily, is not self-consciously grotesque: he is oblivious to both his absurdity and his barbarity – two of the characteristics he most deplores in others. The novel is a sustained, virtuoso exercise in dramatic irony. At times it’s so deadpan that the reader is in danger ...”

“... vernacular revivalist and the younger a skilled landscape architect, he portrayed himself as a self-taught artist who learned what he needed by haunting the yards of traditional craftsmen builders. Eventually, he all but scratched his family from the record – especially his curious father, a military horse painter turned landscapist whose later years ...”

“... professionalise their operation. The army had far greater firepower than the police; the narcos’ self-defence strategies would have to be more sophisticated. Money wasn’t the problem: the production, export and import of drugs generates more than enough to arm a criminal gang, and it would be no trouble at all to pay higher salaries than the Mexican army ...”

“... Earls Court, and a legal action brought by Finlay against Fulcrum Press had triggered a savage and self-inflicted defeat for the progressive side. One notable antagonist, Hugh MacDiarmid, puts in an appearance early on. MacDiarmid had been Finlay’s best man, but when Finlay published Glasgow Beasts, an’ a Burd in 1961 the pioneer of synthetic Scots was ...”

“... Lexicon (Pangaean is a universal language, à la Esperanto). The Teleportation Accident has the self-help book Dames! and How to Lay Them: Want to impress a dame the morning after the night before? Run to the kitchen while she’s still snoozing fit to bust, and come back with what I like to call the Egg Majestique. That’s one of every type of egg on a ...”

“... economic thought is shaky, they also fail to grasp why Keynes rejected the idea that markets are self-stabilising. Throughout Animal Spirits they portray him as reintegrating psychology with economic theory. No doubt this was one of Keynes’s goals, but it is not his most fundamental revision of economic orthodoxy. Among his other accomplishments he was the ...”

“... Without being timid about his own artistic worth, he largely resisted the normal mechanisms of self-promotion. He turned down the Légion d’Honneur (while accepting foreign honours with no cachet in Paris), refused to have anything to do with musical cliques, detested deference or homage, and was so secretive (if that’s the right word for simply not ...”

“... policy in the Middle East since World War Two: naivety compounded by miscalculation and domestic self-interest, creating situations that Washington attempts to redeem by plunging deeper into only dimly understood conflicts. In 1956, problem number one for the US in the Middle East was Nasser, the charismatic, capricious and very ambitious Arab ...”

“... with books, perhaps, or at least ‘high’ literature, that drives so much of Werther’s self-image. He loves poetry, especially Homer and Ossian but also Lessing and Klopstock. His story raises the question of whether too much reading, or a certain kind of reading, is healthy or dangerous for the unformed personality. Rousseau had asked the same ...”

“... provided with girlfriends. We know from Slipstream, Howard’s autobiography, that Louise is a self-portrait. Something like this seems to have happened with her father, and perhaps she blamed her mother (women’s ‘frigidity’ has been made to answer for a lot), though the shadow fades in the later books, almost as if it’s been forgotten. And the ...”

“... promotion of his own work and that of his coterie, does style really mean much more than self-advancement? In one way, no. With its emphasis on the men and women who populated the scene in London between 1908 and 1917, Verse Revolutionaries is decidedly about the pursuit of what Pound called ‘the white stag, Fame’. He had a knack for it. As a ...”

“... classicism during that era, its preoccupation with rhetoric, and a supposed revival of Greek self-consciousness in the aftermath of absorption into the Roman Empire. Grecophone culture in the early empire was, however, extraordinarily diverse: how could a single formula (however hazily defined) capture such varied figures as the erotic novelist Achilles ...”

“... isn’t happy, how can we be? Freud, in accordance with his reality principle (good title for a self-help bestseller, there), explained that the aim of psychoanalysis was to transform ‘hysterical misery into common unhappiness’. That, like ‘good enough’ mothering, always seemed a reasonable and graceful objective. But Rubin is more ambitious and ...”

“... the decision to make New Orleans the new capital, unless one considers cunning in the service of self-interested ambition an ineluctability of history.’ Certainly Bienville’s self-interest was important, but does any historian not consider human self-interest an ‘ineluctability of ...”

“... She’s just as persuasive now in throwing doubt on the other prime suspect, a ‘would-be wit and self-serving layabout’ called William Hatchett – which leaves Hatchett with a single surviving claim to fame, as author of A Rehearsal of Kings … with the Unheard of Catastrophe of Macplunderkan, King of Roguomania, one of the anti-ministerial farces that ...”