“... Edmund Spenser’s request to be buried near him in 1599.The abbey’s most jaw-dropping piece of self-aggrandisement – it’s a pretty high bar – is the tomb of George Villiers. Villiers was the favourite of both James I, who said he was ‘as beautiful as a hunting leopard’ and made him duke of Buckingham, and Charles I, who had him buried next to the ...”

“... I go. I come. I delve. I piss. I drool. I spit.’ His pursuit of casual sex can seem excessively self-interested, but Dustan was also deeply embedded in a community. Names of friends, bars and nightclubs conjure a closed circuit where everyone knows everyone and partners are passed from person to person: ‘I have a friend who put his two hands around his ...”

“... is a key to this anthology’s account of the long tradition of scepticism about exorcism. A self-important but credulous parish priest is tricked into performing an exorcism by tall tales of an unlaid ghost and buried treasure; there are mysterious lights, wailing and even a letter from the gratefully exorcised soul in purgatory. The tale also provides ...”

“... Democracy inclines towards toxic populism, just as Plato warned. Capitalism inclines towards self-serving oligarchy, just as Marx predicted. Each works only if the other is there.Wolf would like to think that democracy and capitalism suit each other, despite their differences. Both rest on an idea of individual human agency. In a capitalist economy ...”

“... Morton Fullerton, whom she had met through James, strangely led to The Reef of 1912, the self-consciously tragic novel in which she comes closest to late James. Here the involved multi-character social chronicle temporarily gives way to a story of sexual susceptibility and betrayal mostly set in a country house and taking place between four main ...”

“... because they were Irish and because they were financially more secure than Taylor). A tough, self-made businessman and gambler, who won £27,000 in one night in 1963 playing poker on a commission basis, Taylor is at another level an embodiment of many of the virtues Mrs Thatcher is prone to recommend: ...”

“... Henry Crawford’s complacent comment in Mansfield Park – when he deplored the notion of a self-satisfied ‘taste’ for poetry, as if for ‘Frontiniac or sherry’. All this is crude stuff, of course, compared to the way Shakespeare insensibly entered into the minds and the style of Coleridge and Hazlitt, helped in both cases by the influence of ...”

“... pit bulls, twin heads wobbling in the window. Gold chains, leather hats: pumped to the limits of self-parody, the bosses in their glitzed company limo look like snuff-film extras. The wretched Alsatian slinks off to sniff at cigarette packets and to pee on a few steps. In the old days, apparently, around 1985, the drugs were carried inside the collars of the ...”

“... strangeness’ for Wyeth’s Farm Road, a picture in which Wyeth practises an ordinance of self-denial – and is followed by Updike. In Farm Road, the fully clothed Helga is a different kind of bust, a head and shoulders seen from behind. Her plaited and parted hair is echoed by a clump of trees on the top of a steep hill. Her coat and the hill are ...”

“... are taking power now. Tim Garton Ash listed some of these: a belief in civil society – ‘social self-organisation’ – at the expense of the state, non-violence, the notion that peace without democratic freedoms is no peace. He might have added to this list: faith in the market economy, with the pious hope that the market will prove compatible with ...”

“... employs the stream of consciousness (‘Horrid stream!’ as Lawrence said), and probes the self. Best of all, she writes for an élite (unlike Dickens): ‘we cannot usefully judge her fiction by any ideological standards of readability.’ It is difficult to assess in translation the kind of writing that must depend for its success on verbal ...”

“... the eye, the wish to be first with assurances, the eager glint of the spectacles, the unstoppable self-regard in the guise of self-deprecation ... Kenneth Widmerpool! Adjustments made for the Wykehamist rather than the Eton style (Gaitskell, too, had been at Winchester), it has the tone of the power-votary and ...”

“... from the output targets of central planning as well as from the more familiar imperatives of self-interest. In principle, the problem can be solved by privatisation. The trick is to give the person who makes decisions about the use of a resource (a piece of land, for example) property rights in that resource, so that he knows his own economic interests ...”

“... of irreligion Vico was prepared to approach. At the same time, to view Vico as a member – even a self-consciously embattled member – of the République des Lettres carries no automatic implication of hostility to the Enlightenment. Several of the ideas he developed in his attempt to rebut the sceptical account of natural man as merely ...”

“... who has what I’d call an unusually good memory for apparel, possessed that keen sense of self-preservation that the more emotional ‘Dick’ Hannay lacked. ‘I certainly didn’t address him the way I had at other times, as Mr Hoover.’ I should just about think not. A year later, Mrs Rosenstiel, still a martyr to her hubby’s specialised ...”