“... as much a liability as an honour. But then Bishop herself seemed curiously uninterested in self-promotion. Much of her life was spent at what looks like a calculated distance from the literary and academic centres of power, lying doggo. Only towards the end did she return to Boston, where she had spent most of her childhood, to accept a post at nearby ...”

“... world of natural theology with a world which offered much more room for individual initiative and self-improvement – a materialistic world where the rules were set by nature rather than God. Thus during the Reform Bill crisis of 1831-32, the Tory geologist Charles Lyell conflated his uneasiness about the atheistic science to which he had been exposed in ...”

“... clear. The enforcement of Western environmental standards on developing countries expresses the self-indulgent romanticism of late-modern consumer cultures. It is both self-deceiving and inequitable. Developing countries cannot hope to protect their environments by curtailing economic growth. On the contrary, only further ...”

“... the seriousness of the situation.’ Recent experience in Bosnia, though, suggests that in self-defence even artillery fire can be compatible with traditional British notions of minimum force and peace-keeping. General Sir Peter de la Billière, commander of the British forces in the Gulf, is more obviously a Clausewitzian, arguing that ‘once they ...”

“... that it mattered even more to give an appearance of industry and humility. He cultivated humorous, self-deprecating understatement: it was said that he was not asked to write the Declaration of Independence for fear that he would put jokes into it. Disputatious in his youth, Franklin learned from experience to avoid never, always and inevitably and to favour ...”

“... Fan-Mail (1977), for example, owe an obvious debt to Auden’s epistle. So do Charles Osborne’s self-advertising ‘Letter to W.H. Auden’ (‘The fact is that I’m writing a huge book/About you – it’s a kind of ‘Life and Works’ – / In which I aim to take a searching look/At all your poems, books and plays, your quirks’), Francis Spufford’s ...”

“... medicine satisfies an immature hankering to play the big guy, basking in glory, the apparent self-sacrifices involved assuaging feelings of guilt and providing ego-defence. The heroics of the operating-theatre or the ‘fire brigade’ drama of the emergency call gratify Boy’s Own Paper cravings for adventure, and above all the authority structures of ...”

“... or darkness of that term into the reader’s eyes, by showing how prejudiced, how quick to draw self-flattering conclusions, have been some interpretations by well-known critics of ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. The second chapter, labelled starkly enough ‘Anti-Semitism’, turns the argument back upon Eliot himself; and in so doing deals with ...”

“... the very few writers down under who could be fanciful by nature, without giving any impression of self-consciousness. But in fact realism in the usual sense was not what anyone produced, for Australian writing took everything for granted – the empty country, the dust, the trees, the urban scene above all – because taking things for granted is the stance ...”

“... Hamilton, Alick West, H.R. Barbor, Miles Malleson. To Lucas, these writers differed from the more self-regarding literati in their search for ‘a little-told story: a story not of despair, but of resistance, even vision’. The patricidal disaffection of Berjeman, Waugh and the Sitwells, defined in Lucas’s account as Bright Young Things, was, in ...”

“... artistic director says, ‘Sir! You know this music better than you know your so-called self. Make every effort to breathe naturally and your voice will be buoyed-up as upon a great cushion, your voice will spring as upon a trampoline! Breathe from the very balls of you, sir! We want the bright, the focused, the ringing top. Mr Lucchesi! Remember ...”

“... of History as the ‘basic introduction’ to history as taught in the universities. Evans is a self-declared ‘Rankean’ empiricist, committed to Ranke’s view that facts and documents ‘speak for themselves’. He believes that the proper method for historians today is the same as it has always been, at least since the 19th century, when the rules of ...”

“... intelligent exile, trying to tell the truth, and the portrait he paints of his own younger self is of someone who, like the wartime GIs, was oversexed and over here. You get the same impression in London. Whereas Naipaul, an Oxford graduate with plenty of friends in the bohemian world, is a man who feels detached from the English social scene, Theroux ...”

“... rule that the picturesque is based on someone else’s inconvenience. Harar is a walled city, self-contained. Though you are no longer required to leave your spear at the city gates, you are still very much an outsider here. Only two Europeans have made any impact, in the sense that their names are known and recognised. One is the English explorer Richard ...”

“... very difficult to believe one would wish to trade the blankness of death for living agony. Even self-confessed masochists are clear that the pain they want is the pain of their choosing, at the time of their choosing and with the sadist of their choosing, not an attack of toothache or appendicitis. Yet masochism in some more general form must be implicated ...”