“... contributions, it should be said, were meagre). One cannot help wondering about the combination of self-restraint and sly wit which led Sir Keith Thomas, chairman of the dictionary’s supervisory committee from inception to completion and one of the most celebrated historians of his generation, to confine himself to a single entry, that on the figure known ...”

“... with near universal international support. Beijing wanted nothing to do with Wijeweera’s Maoist self-fashioning: Zhou Enlai offered Bandaranaike weapons with which to stamp out the JVP. With Wijeweera in prison, the remaining JVP hardliners went underground – they would reappear in the 1980s – but the concerns they had raised did not go unheeded by the ...”

“... hyper-partisan broadcasters, Trump-era populism and conspiracy theory were already creating a self-contained alternative political thought space conducive to the cross-fertilisation of conspiracist ideas. Covid-19 and government efforts to control it – an extreme event, accompanied by what can seem baffling and intrusive restrictions – appear, in the ...”

“... volumes has been a striking contrast to the earlier edition. Nicolson today seems conventional, self-satisfied and smug, while Channon, for all his misjudgments, ingratiating behaviour and bigotry, is revealing about public and private life, society and sexuality, and honest about himself to a degree that makes these Diaries a weird kind of masterpiece. He ...”

“... presenting tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinians as collateral damage, in a war of self-defence forced on the world’s most moral army, as the IDF claims to be?The answers for many people around the world cannot but be tainted by a long-simmering racial bitterness. Palestine, as George Orwell pointed out in 1945, is a ‘colour issue’, and ...”

“... of one ratepayer (literate in English or Chinese), one vote, as part of the leisurely run-up to self-rule that was normal in all British colonies. His plan got little local support. Few Chinese businessmen saw any need to share even municipal government with rickshaw-pullers. Hong Kong’s British (mostly Scottish) tycoons have never lost their ...”

“... easily findable on YouTube. ‘What we want to look at is the hard edge of a tough, fashionable, self-conscious group, now at the top of the New York avant-garde art world,’ Melvyn Bragg explains, blunt brown sideburns toning nicely with his blunt brown tie. A bit later he addresses Acker directly. ‘You talk in your books about doing away with ...”

“... mental not physical damage. Only many years of psychoanalysis, he believed, had saved him from self-destruction through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s ...”

“... found no dinner prepared? Besides, she had meant to phone the weekly order at the grocer’s, the Self Help, and it might be too late for the order-boy to deliver it … Our picnic was too soon over.Lottie died not long afterwards. Her self-effacement seems to have served as a caution to her daughter.Frame and Sargeson read ...”

“... a class by themselves in the history of artificial life: the first solo free-walking self-propelled androids’. The other figures offer variations on the monk’s theme. One is a lay brother worrying a tiny beaded rosary; another a bearded saint crowned by a halo, with a six-note glockenspiel in its rump including miniature bells and ...”

“... all good Protestants against the malign influence of Enoch Powell. Powell was a great help to the self-effacing and well-nigh inarticulate leader of the Official Unionists, James Molyneaux, until South Down was lost to the Unionists in 1987. He was a personal advertisement for the complete integration of the Province with Britain for which he stood. He ...”

“... from alienation. Trapped in conflicts which are not of his making, the middleman arrives at a dour self-knowledge which is the keynote of the book. Mukherjee’s dislocated exiles learn tenacity with their disillusionment. Nevertheless, they are as likely to show compassion as anger or brutality. The emigrant Indian woman studying in New York in ‘A Wife’s ...”

“... many other big bananas, Tinguely threw a switch and set the heap on course to clanging, twanging self-destruction. All three networks solemnly recorded the event, which for many people inaugurated the period of ‘non-judgmental’ art criticism. Marcel Duchamp, Warhol’s original Pop guru, commented approvingly that there was merit in the movement to ...”

“... of Amis’s novels that the hero-as-shit, at large in a world of mutual animosity and obsessive self-interest, is one of their most characteristic figures. In The folks that live on the hill the hero-as-shit has given way to the hero-as-patriarch. Harry Caldecote, a retired librarian, heads an extended family of the weak, the lost and the habitually drunk ...”

“... fashionable world. Following the portraits in sequence, one watches him gathering skills. A stiff self-portrait about the age of twenty shows him in a Cavalier lace collar and a cloak lined with red. Anne Bateman, painted a year or so later, is also board- (and perhaps bored-) stiff. Five years on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of ...”