“... a fair-minded referee of their battles with Labour’s centrists. His story begins with Benn’s self-reinvention as a tribune of the people in the wake of 1968. Benn’s foundational insight was that ‘more people want to do more for themselves, and believe they are capable of doing so, if the conditions could only be created that would make this ...”

“... series and the pastoral tradition, as well as to the mixture of dramatic speaking and self-revelation that sonnets often exhibit. In the following decades, once Frost had developed his theories about the desirability of poetry’s proximity to ordinary speech, he tended to claim that his influences came from life rather than literature. ‘I want ...”

“... religion and its shadowy aftermath. The poem seemed to have a lovely assuredness and finality. The self-deprecating voice – resigned and a bit sad – was having an argument with no one. The tone was mild and tolerant, and although it was filled with uncertainty, there was a convincing veneer of pure certainty about the main matter, which is that churches ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of homosexuality in schools, it’s family relations that stand in the way of the sexual self-understanding of young people. What are the odds of someone like Mungo being able to overcome his negative programming if he waits another half-decade? The laws that masquerade as his protectors would rather see him mangled than whole.The Glasgow of Young ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... English. I’ve thrown in my lot with England. It’s the best country in the world.’ Such loyal self-deprecation is scarcely less suspect. The Crooked Timber of Humanity is more an elegant restatement than a substantial addition to his characteristic themes. Three quarters of the book consists of essays from the same fund of texts out of which the four ...”

“... painful ambivalence, at others with unqualified enthusiasm, but nearly always as the only means of self-determination at their disposal. In The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, published in 1992, Davidson spoke of the ‘spiny contradictions’ beneath the rhetoric of nationalism: ‘If nationalism has been and can be a ...”

“... declares at the beginning of his memoir, has been ‘a rich, multifaceted and unique story’. Self-flattery is characteristically Lanzmannian, but its truth in this case can hardly be denied. He has lived on a grand scale. A teenage fighter in the Resistance, he became Sartre’s protégé in the early 1950s as an editor at Les Temps modernes. He also ...”

“... his wounds and pains,’ Jackson suggests, ‘led him to a place of brittle irony with others, and self-pity with himself.’ The incident further chipped away at the fragile foundations of his parents’ marriage. Estelle, the ‘rebellious dissenter’, wanted to sue the hotel, but Joseph persuaded Chester to sign away his claim, since doing so entitled him ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... be summarised as follows. Une Saison en Enfer was composed in 1873. The mode is valedictory, and self-punishing, but it is not the final work – Rimbaud continued to compose his Illuminations, which had begun as a handful of prose-poems some time in 1872, either in Charleville or during his first stint in London with Verlaine. Meanwhile, in ‘Mauvais ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”