“... investigative gaze; incidents lose their epic character; idols turn out to have feet of clay. The self-improving ethos, and with it the grand narrative of what Hudson refers to insistently as ‘the raising of the Working Class’, has disappeared without a trace (we are twice told that there is not a single bookshop in East Durham, only the paperback shelf ...”

“... cleansing’. The aim of Pol Pot’s revolution was a pure-blood and almost entirely rural, self-sufficient Khmer nation-state The shadow cast across history by the retreating peasantry is generally much longer and deeper than most analyses have acknowledged. And in Cambodia, certain exceptional circumstances let it attain for four years to an ...”

“... be true, not at the same time. That plural consciousness is too much to accept. But Carolyn is, self-evidently, very much alive, and feels obliged, as a duty, to swoop on inaccuracies perpetrated by career biographers, manipulations that nudge her out of the official portraits. Biography is serious business these days. It underwrites the republication of a ...”

“... vapidities of the Greenwich Dome – a Festival of Britain manqué – to reveal that such self-confidence has dissolved. Our ‘crisis’ of national identity has become an old friend. It’s 25 years since Tom Nairn first willed the ‘Break-Up of Britain’, and ten since Linda Colley influentially explained that Britons were the product of ...”

“... Power summarises her dispiriting conclusion this way: ‘Unless another country acts for self-interested reasons, as was the case when Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, or armed members of the victim group manage to fight back and win, as Tutsi rebels did in Rwanda in 1994, the perpetrators of genocide have usually retained power.’ But what about ...”

“... three – half an hour before it was time to go … and say out loud, looking very serious and self-important, “Mademoiselle, can I go, please? I’ve got to go and suck my sister.”’ ‘Merciful heavens! Suck her sister?’ ‘Yes. Just imagine, her married sister, who was weaning a child, had too much milk and her breasts hurt her. She pretended ...”

“... saw the Orient and its unbroken past as a foundation, a point of origin, and a parameter for the self and for creativity; there is no ‘Orient’, or ‘East’, for the medieval poets Chandidas, Vidyapati or Jayadeva, as there is, so profoundly, for Tagore. Nor would it have occurred to Chandidas to locate himself in history, and to claim and create ...”

“... borough, and many of them are young Bangladeshi men. These guys are Cockneys by geography and in self-image too. Walls and bus shelters are daubed with gang names – the Brick Lane Massive, Cannon Street Posse, Stepney Green Posse and the Shadwell Crew – that recall how, long before the Krays and the Richardsons, long before Jewish boxers like Jackie Berg ...”

“... at the same time leaving the original Ronnie behind and forging new connections to a plausible self. I decided his family’s address at the time of his birth would be 167 Caledonian Road, because the address seemed right in class terms for the man I was inventing and also because I have a feeling for King’s Cross. I placed him at Blessed Sacrament ...”

“... published in 1937), on the excellence of his own, or indeed any, system of strenuous self-criticism and self-discipline, which should lead a writer to cut and cut again. Kipling was a man who could hardly speak of himself without ironic quizzicality, without silences and reticences. The theory of the condensed ...”

“... so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that when Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Lord Lloyd Webber, as we must now say, bought his Canaletto at Christie’s he paid the £10 million bill by Access in order to earn ...”

“... Designated Mourner, a play about love, blood, pajamas, the current police state and the passionate self-love of each of us. Wally, sitting very still once at the beginning and once at the end, sets a cocktail napkin on fire. It flames out like Moses then goes lilting up and away into ash. Ash is astounding. Made out of death yet sort of offhand. Wally’s play ...”

“... on what she called ‘legal medicine’, though she ‘found that no one, including alas! my own self, knew exactly what legal medicine was supposed to mean’. She proceeded intuitively, from a conviction that more violent crimes would be solved if only policemen were more observant at crime scenes (she was a great reader of Sherlock Holmes). The ...”

“... art, Sipping at a spoonful of yoghurt And smiling at our smiles, described his dancing Among self-beheaded dancers who went on dancing with their heads (But only God, he said, can create a language). Journalists proffered, on platters of silence, Split noses, and sliced-off ears and lips –  ... At a giddy moment – To the belly-dancer, the ...”

“... Self-Portrait as Picture Window First day of snow, the low sun glinting on the gate post where a single Teviot ewe is licking frost-melt from the bars, the other sheep away in the lower field, the light on the crusted meadow grass that makes me think of unripe plums so local an event it seems, for one long breath, that time might stop; or, better, that it isn’t me at all who stands here, at this window, gazing out, not me who woke up late, when everyone had gone to work or school, but someone else, a man so like myself that nobody would spot the difference – same eyes, same mouth – but gifted with a knowledge I can scarcely register in words, unless I call it graceful and nomadic, some lost art of finding home in sheep trails, lines of flight, the feel of distance singing in the flesh, that happiness-as-forage, bedding in, declining, making sense of what it finds ...”