“... manipulator of his fellow senators. His political gifts were perfectly suited to a small club of self-important men whom he could get at one on one. He alternately flattered them shamelessly and openly threatened them, never missing an opportunity to get them on the hook for something they either coveted or feared. Everyone knew that Johnson was the conduit ...”

“... so small, because it completely accepts the nobility and its right to exist. There is a necessary self-contradiction here: a party that would reject the nobility as well as belief in the laws would straightaway have the entire population behind it, but such a party cannot come into being, because no one dares to reject the nobility. We live on the razor’s ...”

“... and brought and kept them hereIs lost: and for a while they join a terrible equality,Are virtuous, self-sacrificing, free:And so insidious is this libertyThat those surviving it will bearAn even greater servitude to its root:Believing they were whole, while they were brave;That they were rich, because their loot was great;That war was meaningful, because they ...”

“... in Manchester, who was sacked in June for selling too diverse a range of books. Will Self took up the cause to have him reinstated, but at the time of writing, the manager of the shop in question is called Andy Rossiter. Now Waterstone’s have been criticised for trying to force small publishers into selling all their titles to the chain at a ...”

“... Paume and carried a tube of red paint with which to threaten sharp-suited gropers on the Metro. A self-portrait from 1963 shows the teenage artist on the cusp, turning from Cookham schoolgirl to Juliette Gréco: a headscarf, knotted Sloane-style under the chin, with a 1960s fringe poking out at the top; steady look, quizzical mouth.England has been slower ...”

“... modernity, had the easily underestimated Lada. Was making cars once an indicator of national self-sufficiency? Is it still? Rover, Morris, Austin, Triumph, Vauxhall, Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce, Mini, Land Rover: when we hear the names of these firms, we think of the cars they made, and of cars driven by parents or grandparents, sisters or old ...”

“... presences. In Edward, on the other hand, the Major repeatedly sees traces of a mildness and self-mockery ‘that did not go at all with his leonine features’. When a party of Oxford undergraduates drops by to goad this ‘perfectly splendid old Tory’ (‘I mean, have you even read Rousseau’s Le Contrat social?’), the reader is manipulated into ...”

“... agony; and Sonny, the 653rd Maharajah of Badanpur, who assumes that The Mulberry Elephant, a vast self-justificatory volume privately published in India, will somehow sweep the field. If the lining isn’t the point of this garment, then how does it drape, how is it cut and shaped? Lost for Words is a curious production, both off-the-peg and strangely ...”

“... producers and translators. ‘I feel I’m getting more and more entangled in professionalism and self-exploitation,’ he wrote in 1958 to Barney Rosset, his New York publisher, ‘and that it would be really better to stop altogether than to go on with that.’ In some ways, success had a calming effect on Beckett, whose experiences during the Occupation ...”

“... described as ‘more hawkish’ than most Democrats, and indeed, like other ambitious women in the self-parodically masculine world of Washington, she may well have concluded that bellicose posturing is the only way a woman can prove her mettle in the contest for commander-in-chief. Certainly as secretary of state, Clinton allied herself with women who ...”

“... to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble.In these seemingly sober, useful, self-deprecating sentences lurks the MacGuffin, to borrow Alfred Hitchcock’s term, that reaches its epic, mind-boggling climax in the publication, nearly a century on, of Faber’s two all-comprehending new tomes, edited by Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue. The ...”

“... interested in himself? Not, I think, so very much. He had a more than healthy ego and enough self-knowledge to admit it, but all his curiosity was turned outward – towards problems, politics, literatures, languages, landscapes. Never without a book, whether bound for a tutorial or the local A&E, for decades he disappeared off for tramping holidays or ...”

“... engagement with their precursors. By ‘great labour’ Eliot appears to have in mind intense self-directed study, such as Milton’s five-year ‘studious retirement’ in his twenties. The goal Eliot envisions is to absorb your precursors so thoroughly that they speak in and through your work. This is not ...”

“... his high-wire act of slumming it with socially unavowable desires while lording it with his social self-image: Charlus skates on ice, dangerously but also skilfully, though beneath the ice madness always threatens (‘madman’ recurs as a description of him in this mood). But if anachronistic ‘camping’ of the text can produce misreadings, all is forgiven ...”

“... departments in the less disciplined disciplines, and marginal to society as a whole: the self-absorption of the guild and its detachment from social reality may be gauged by the occasionally overheard reflection that literary theory, as practised by expensive pedagogues in universities of the affluent West, is a ‘revolutionary’ act. Rousseau’s ...”