“... that he, Brivati, is not (he was born three years after Gaitskell’s death); nor is he bound by a self-denying ordinance, as Williams was, to refrain from discussing his subject’s private life. What that discussion entails is a possible homosexual involvement at Oxford, when Gaitskell was part of a gay circle around Maurice Bowra. All one can say about it ...”

“... Cat on a fence I’ll kiss it – always, always, I will – didn’t I?’ His nearly final word, self-directed, is: ‘Stupstraight’. Julia Kristeva might call Helfgott’s way with words ‘semiotic’. Richard Alleva, in Commonweal, calls him ‘a manic babbler whose logical skips and leaps, wisecracks, speed-freak stutterings and surreal wordplays ...”

“... was the beneficiary of the new apprehension of New York as a gorgeously set stage for the modern self. Only the previous year, a French refugee painter had pronounced the city the capital of the modern world – quite a judgment coming from a Parisian. The idea of New York as a city of lyrical modernity, a running metropolitan romance, was in large measure ...”

“... than the boys. There is something terrifyingly pure about their violence and the thirst for self-transformation. They renounce their roots to take as their models the revolutionaries whose conviction is enacted most ruthlessly. They manufacture like unstoppable machines the abhorrence that propels their steely idealism. Their rage is combustible. They ...”

“... Graham, who inherited the Washington Post from his father-in-law, Eugene Meyer, and his shy, self-effacing wife, Katharine, who took over the company when her husband shot himself in 1963. It was Philip Graham who induced John Kennedy to choose Lyndon Johnson as his running-mate in 1960. This was wise and far-reaching advice, for without Johnson on the ...”

“... of three centuries later so cunningly used by Jonathan Spence to construct his Emperor of China: Self-Portrait of K’ang-hsi. If we had to judge Khubilai on the basis of his appearance in later Chinese historical writings we might never be tempted to read a full biography of him at all. Many of them cheat by taking a narrow view of legitimacy and not ...”

“... how justified, has threatened to impose its own caustic limitations on her work. Atwood is too self-aware not to be alert to the risk. The Handmaid’s Tale attempted the scale of prophecy, a traditionally potent route for the disaffected.* Now Cat’s Eye turns from an imagined future to the recollected past, a Canadian childhood of the Forties and ...”

“... recognise Niall Ferguson’s book for what it is: an extended and argumentative tutorial from a self-consciously clever, confrontational young don, determined to stand everything on its head and argue with vehemence against whatever he sees as the conventional wisdom – or, worse still, the fashion – of the time. The idea is to teach the young to think ...”

“... penetration (this, at least, was Dalí’s story, for what it is worth). Compared with the bogus self-promotion of his later years, Dalí’s posturing in those early days, though often offensive, could still be excused as a sort of advanced anti-bourgeois rebelliousness, but one is still hard put to understand why Lorca was so besotted with him, unless one ...”

“... One of the difficulties with weapons is that they do not automatically self-destruct once they have fulfilled their function. The problem particularly afflicts Americans who, taking advantage of lax gun-control laws, tend to buy whatever they think they need to defend themselves. But as the danger recedes, they frequently forget about the lethal arsenals they have accumulated ...”

“... of the discovery of DNA, in which she had played a crucial part. James Watson’s outrageously self-heroising Double Helix systematically ridiculed and patronised ‘Rosy’s’ contributions to the work (‘Rosy’, needless to say, was a diminutive she never used herself), while at the same time portraying her as ...”

“... might entail Vikram Seth being least like himself when he is most like ‘Vikram Seth’). The self-portrait of Michael as a lonely man, blocked in his development by his attachment to his own depressive states, is the main imaginative achievement of An Equal Music. The best writing in the novel is devoted to articulating Michael’s solitary perceptions ...”

“... the House of Apollo irritatingly appears throughout as the House of ‘Apolline’). For all its self-confessed provisionality, it is by far the best modern account of Pompeii as a historical city: indeed, the best account, more generally, of the visual and architectural impact of Roman power on the face of a medium-sized(?) Italian community in the late ...”

“... and screamed with frustration when she failed.’ Growing up in a plutocratic household, where self-indulgence was encouraged and petulance tolerated, she ‘became used to doing more or less what she liked’. Her father’s election to Parliament in 1879 netted invitations from ‘everybody of importance’ and, in turn, filled the Tennant establishments ...”

“... for two days’ work directing a television commercial – and the same day his other self, the loony-left personality, is admiring Edward Bond’s play exposing Shakespeare as ‘a man who Sold Out to the Bourgeoisie and no longer stood up for the Progressive Currents of his Time’. (My capitals.) He then makes two commercials for the Royal ...”