“... face I realised I had caught a piece of lost time. Not only Madrid and Dr Barros and an earlier self, but Viridiana as it felt when I first saw it: blasphemous, brilliant, ragged, indifferent to the preoccupations of unity and coherence which most aesthetics demand – Saturn swallowing a daughter.If I had been less devoted to the notion of the death of the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... But do all the same tell me.’ Ritchie’s diary on the other hand, where he mopes and frets in self-dislike, is, as he admits, the chronicle of ‘an obsessive cycle of boredom, dissipation, remorse, apprehension, boredom again’ in which his centre of emotional gravity rolls around from Sylvia to Elizabeth and back to himself. Urbane, cultivated and ...”

“... in support the poem Maxims I, with its advice (putting it in 20th-century terms) to encourage the self-esteem of the young. Rich, stable, liberal and progressive: why did they lose to a bunch of pirates? The phenomenon certainly seems to demand an explanation, though there may be more than one. Wood starts with a broad perspective and narrows down steadily to ...”

“... and Cicero, both of whom came from towns enfranchised earlier in the Republic. Their numbers and self-confidence increased dramatically after the universal enfranchisement of 91-89. Claiming virtues more authentically Roman than those of the old nobility, they started to make it into the Senate in sizeable numbers only in the Augustan age. Members of this ...”

“... Fordlandia staggered on, but it never really recovered. The notion of making the cafeteria self-service was unremarkable and led to such destruction only because the workers were already disaffected. Any excuse would have done. The nature of their unhappiness tells us a great deal about Henry Ford as well as about the sort of workforce he was dealing ...”

“... age and an even more certain obesity. He writes in the first person of what he calls ‘the art of self-slaughter’, not suicide but a form of mental magic, in which he makes his unloved body disappear bit by bit, only to resurrect it at the end of the session, ready for another vanishing tomorrow, or when he feels like it. Flora and Philip are married, and ...”

“... nearly molested, aged five, on a beach, by a wavy-haired stranger. Her well-developed sense of self enables the narrative, for the most part, to zip along. She has delivered parts of the book as a very enjoyable, sometimes dazzling one-woman show (I saw her last year at the Bath Literary Festival), and at times – particularly in the delightful early ...”

“... have poetry without dandyism, and that includes all those I’ve mentioned: Frederick Seidel self-evidently, but also those seemingly austere figures Whitman, Brecht, Murray and Brodsky. As Wallace Stevens said, ‘It must give pleasure.’) It looks random, but like Thom Gunn’s blue jay scuffling in the bushes, it ‘follows some hidden ...”

“... rights that sustained the original uprising is dismissed as a distraction, the preoccupation of self-righteous amateurs, while seasoned servants of the old regime are rehabilitated. Most disheartening of all, the sycophants who rushed for cover three years ago are re-emerging to offer their services to the new masters. Egypt’s briefly empowered citizens ...”