“... what Archer would doubtless call the greatest of all prizes. It says much about Mandelson’s self-confidence that he engaged energetically in the subsequent war – a campaign conducted with off-the-record briefings, the supplanting of Brownite X with Blairite Y in the fifth most senior post at the Department of Trade and Industry and anonymous ...”

“... ends) at home – the ripples of sympathy growing weaker and weaker as they move outwards from self to tax-adviser to hamster to wife to fellow Americans and remaining mammals – was, according to Geras, refuted by the motives driving gentiles to rescue Jews from liquidation. Rescuer testimony suggested, contrary to Rorty, that shared humanity was the ...”

“... entirety. Most OuLiPian texts astonish not by their powers of expansion, however, but by their self-imposed laws of constraint. The best known of these are Georges Perec’s lipogrammatic La Disparition (1969), composed without once using the letter e, and his Les Revenentes (1972), which contains no vowels except e. Over the years OuLiPians have developed ...”

“... habits, other people’s defeats’, and languishes in ‘quiet desperation and muted icy self-destroying rage’. But Yates reserves his special scorn for attempts to transcend this environment. Mailer’s terms may have been tough, but at least he offered 1950s man some alternatives: he must be hip or square, ‘with it’ or ‘doomed not to ...”

“... If the primordial zoning division between home and work is annoying for cybercommuters and self-employed professionals, it is truly punitive for Latino households whose incomes are supplemented by home-based car repair, food catering or bridal sewing. Many cities and suburbs have restricted or even outlawed the weekend garage sales and informal ...”

“... set’, Liszt must have known that the public would take Réminiscences de Don Juan (1841) ‘as a self-portrait in sound, just as everyone had assumed that Byron’s Don Juan was an autobiography’. Then there’s the private myth about Byron: ‘I still feel the same liking, the same passion for L.B.,’ Liszt wrote to Countess Marie d’Agoult, his first ...”

“... driven to discover the truth of its own condition: its ‘metaphors of agency, mastery, and self-centredness’ are revealed to be just that – metaphors, illusions, self-deceptions. The impulse to the lyrical, and to the integrity and authority of the self, survives only in the ...”

“... in any general, xenophobic way, it has accelerated the slow resurgence of English national self-awareness. Was that effect intended by the new Tory leadership? It’s hard to know. In the short term, there are Tory votes to be gained in the South by calling for a ban on Scottish MPs voting on English matters. But in the longer term, the prizes the ...”

“... the need never to be wrong. Just as Donne was Empson’s preferred sensibility – his most vivid self-portrait is his portrait of Donne in his great essay of 1957, ‘Donne the Space Man’, in which Donne is referred to as an ‘intellectual buccaneer’ of ‘defiant brilliance’ – the Judeo-Christian God’s was the sensibility he dreaded, never in ...”

“... cockney wideboys in British gangster flicks. Xan – who shares his surname with Duane Meo, John Self’s ‘whizzkid editor’ in Money – is sardonically described as a ‘Renaissance Man’: he has published a short story collection called Lucozade, and plays rhythm guitar in a Camden café ‘every second Wednesday’. His old man, Mick Meo ...”

“... The reader is invited to fall in with a persona of Baedekered cosmopolitanism and sensual self-assurance. ‘We are prepared to enjoy stone in the South. For, as we come to the southern light of the Mediterranean, we enter regions of coherence and of settled forms.’ The prose nimbly sidesteps stock wordings and standard speech rhythms: ‘Stone ...”

“... all-powerful and yet in constant danger of collapse; the people who observe it from outside, self-styled experts, see it as either a historically explicable economic system or a timeless mythic structure. Once they enter that structure themselves, however, they find it bears little correspondence to the map of it they have drawn with their ...”

“... in March 2003, three days after George Bush had gone to war in Iraq, came across as grandiose and self-important. ‘We like non-fiction and we live in fictitious times,’ he bellowed, dragging his fellow documentary nominees on stage with him. Coming from someone whose films have always depended on picking the facts to suit the story, this seemed a bit ...”

“... close friend, though I never really liked him, and found something threatening about his tough and self-reliant mind … He allowed me to tag along with him, but regarded my endless curiosity and roaming around the camp as a waste of time and energy … His parents were interned in Peking, but he never spoke about them, which baffled me at the time, and I ...”

“... The quirkiest​ of the British Isles is a self-governing jurisdiction between Guernsey and France just over three miles long and less than two miles wide. Sark has its own parliament, its own taxes and its own traffic laws (permitting only tractors, bikes and horse-drawn vehicles). Its central, fertile plateau is protected by cliffs on almost all sides that rise to over three hundred feet ...”