“... said Garden Room there’s a further gauntlet of aides to negotiate and a strange act of ritual self-abnegation to be performed. The Likely Nominee (Maybe) stands about twenty feet in from the door; we can see her in action at the centre of the room, busy posing with acolytes. To approach her, however, one has to execute a kind of involuntary ...”

“... authorities. They wanted to ‘cut it up’. Byron refused, in terms that veer charmingly between self-deprecation and a strong sense of poetical purpose: ‘Confess – confess – you dog – and be candid – that it is the sublime of that there sort of writing …’ Byron had finally learned to bring together Childe Harold and Hints from Horace. The ...”

“... author into scientific object. As one JCVI colleague insisted, this unprecedented act of self-disclosure shouldn’t be seen as rampant egoism but as a deeply moral act, running ‘the risk of divulging intimate personal details, including any current and future genetic markers for disease’, and done ‘to stimulate efforts to develop cheaper ...”

“... factors; and Jefferson, the most memorable character in the novel, is charming, deceitful, self-deluding, sexually unscrupulous (‘Jefferson liked only the sort of pretty woman who was safely married, preferably to one of his friends’) and hypocritical. For all his opposition to cities, banks, manufactories and taxes, he is as much an imperialist as ...”

“... Elevating King to the pantheon of founding fathers, however, has served as a ritual of national self-congratulation that obliterates the radical movement in which King lived, breathed and died. For the parallel between the 1860s and the 1960s extends beyond victory to counter-revolution. The assassinations of Lincoln and King transformed these figures in ...”

“... parties and fancy dress balls. The Treasury made it clear that the Palestine Mandate would be self-supporting, and only a small force was available to police the territory. The first High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, was Jewish, a Zionist and a friend of Weizmann’s. When the Occupied Enemy Territory Administration, run by the Army, handed power to ...”

“... so cleanly split into three separate acts. There is Ellison as struggler-up from poverty towards self-education and mastery. There is Ellison the writer, whose achievement collapses, for practical purposes, into the fate of his one major novel. And, finally, detailed by Rampersad really for the first time, there is Ellison the board member, teacher and ...”

“... Man, whose mentality was once described by Esmond Romilly as a ‘mixture of profit-seeking, self-interest, cheap emotion and organised brutality’, and his reflections on the cargo plane struck exactly the note of amoral, self-pitying, tinpot fatalism adopted by most Nazi and SS survivors facing defeat and ...”

“... of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (‘You might be wondering why I’m here’). There was the self-styled ‘hunter and redneck’ from the Louisiana bayou reality show Duck Dynasty and the former teen star of a 1970s television comedy – noticed by Trump for tweeting that Hillary Clinton is a ‘cunt’ – who called Obama ‘a Muslim or a Muslim ...”

“... as irrational and inferior beings. Gaily agreeing that the chief female virtues are meekness and self-effacement, they managed estates, signed off accounts, bought wardships and brokered marriage settlements, all the while keeping up a steady output of needlework. In some cases, they conspired against the crown while claiming, if it went badly, that their ...”

“... and secret, so empty and alive, so unreal and familiar, so private and noisy’ – reads like a self-diagnosis. In 1954, aged 37, Brennan married St Clair McKelway, formerly the New Yorker’s managing editor, an ex-pilot and manic depressive who was fond of women and drink. Maxwell wrote that ‘it may not have been the worst of all possible marriages, but ...”

“... future. Not ‘When was Germany?’ but ‘When will Germany be?’If ‘Germany’ was a Hegelian self-realising subject, ascending from mere ‘phenomenal’ particularity to a destined universality, what sort of statehood should it attain? Clearly, a precondition for the true Germany was something like unity. The patchwork of principalities must melt into ...”

“... to be against poets, who aren’t invited to the dancers’ parties. There’s even something like self-hatred among the poets, some of whom prefer to frequent the fiction writers’ bar so as to avoid their own kind.The period of the novel is the Obama presidency – an early mention of Trump and the word ‘pussy’ suggests an allusion to the Access ...”

“... received a hand-delivered letter from the Gestapo that accused her of offending ‘national self-respect’, rendering them unable to extend a ‘further right of hospitality’. The international press corps saw her off at the train station the next morning, her arms full of the roses they had given her. By the time she got back to the US, Thompson had ...”

“... but of doing so as an expression of Scotland’s authentic left-wing soul. It was assumed that a self-governing Scotland would lurch to the left, perhaps radically so.Over the first two decades of the Scottish Parliament, this assumption has been frustrated. Writing in 2004, five years into devolution, the historian Richard Finlay noted that ‘for all the ...”