“... social composition, and gave it a more conventionally elite character. Ambitious, prodigious self-made men such as Johnson, Reynolds, Burke and Goldsmith were joined by establishment figures such as Lord Ossory (made a member in 1777) and Viscount Althorp (made a member in 1778), the first peers to be elected. By the time of Johnson’s death, there were ...”

“... it had taken place or whether it was caused by a virus or by bacteria. My ignorance was largely self-inflicted: from an early age I sensed that dwelling on what had happened to me, picking at the emotional scar tissue, wasn’t going to do me much good. Only in the late 1990s, when I was in Iraq talking to doctors and patients in ill-equipped hospitals hit ...”

“... Brumaire,make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionising ...”

“... Fowler) and not for his work as a lexicographer. Fowler is the sacred text of the linguistically self-conscious. McMorris quotes a distinguished judge who ‘had been kept from his bed by it “to a very unusual hour”, adding that it brought “a terror to living and writing”’. A.J.P. Taylor read the whole thing at least once a year, and ranked it as ...”

“... the fragmenting of families and communities, and the traditional American spirit of frontier self-sufficiency. But why did so many people die during those days in Chicago? For one, there are many elderly people in the city who are afraid to answer the door, let alone seek outside help. There are neighbourhoods where social service case-workers try to ...”

“... prehistory. The novel begins in what now looks like Modiano’s trademark style, and very close to self-parody, and it takes a while to move into another mode. The narrator tells us about a newspaper entry he read ‘eight years ago’. The entry in turn dates from 1941, and describes a missing person, Dora Bruder, 15 years old, her parents’ address 41 ...”

“... archives – centuries apart – into something more coherent than their claim to ‘discrete and self-contained’ projects might suggest. Practising New Historicism declares itself to be a ‘belated recognition’ that something should or could have been said about this movement that did not think it was a movement. If it is twenty years too late to be a ...”

“... every country in Central and South America. De Bernières’s narratives are composed of short, self-sufficient segments which connect only obliquely with each other. His novels seem to be all subplot; their principal subject is as enigmatic as their riddlingly irrelevant titles. His prose has a distinctive flavour, but one easier to recognise than to ...”

“... military aeronautics or utopian polar voyages was entangled, in Mendeleev’s own painstaking self-presentation, with the methodical administrator of the national system of standardised measures and the periodic system of atomic weights. Just as long as he saw the tsarist regime as an autocracy whose unconstrained will was directed towards lawlike ...”

“... the only people capable, for Wheeler, of keeping what they know ‘under their hats’. Moved by self-importance, people became twice as garrulous. The secret services, inspired to exploit all those loosened tongues in a different way from the eavesdropping Nazis, proposed to ‘find out what they would and wouldn’t be capable of doing and how far they ...”

“... is not perhaps in a better position than they are. ‘Was it not possible that her husband’s self-mutilation had inoculated her, in some sense, to the terrors that would grasp the imaginations of others.’ And within a few short logical paces Mutz has decided that cannibalism is not so bad compared with, say (to cite as he does another gothic moment in ...”

“... in A History of the World are underpowered. But the only other major drawback is Barnes’s self-consciously whimsical humour, which might work in his journalism but often seems ingratiating between even soft covers. He has a particular weakness for jocular circumlocutions, bedecked – because novelists are supposed to be specific? – with zany ...”

“... the third category, although I understand it very soberly, without a shadow of sentimentality or self-pity . . . To be homeless . . . means only that the person having this defect cannot indicate the streets, cities or community that might be his home, his, as one is wont to say, miniature homeland. It is this ...”

“... isolation from Western civilisation, and made his journey appear more of an exploration of his own self.) We may accept that the details of Phat Diem or Santiago were observable by anyone who happened to be there, but venture to think that only one writer would have selected them and not others present in the scene, and described them in those words in that ...”

“... don’t know. Why?’‘I don’t know either.’The characters in these novels are deeply self-absorbed, their anxious ruminations accounting for much of the irony and pathos. In All That Man Is (2016), Szalay drops the conventional novel for nine stories linked by theme. This allows him to introduce a wider cast of characters, not all of whom are ...”