“... the order and decorum of its past – puritanical lies, especially, about a former absence of self-indulgent sexual behaviour. Both books report a high incidence of drunkenness and casual violence among the poor, with Britain worse than America, and those who were shocked by the Swinging London of the 1960s and 70s might benefit from reading about the ...”

“... is acceptable and what is agreeable (Healey probably lost the leadership on that distinction). Self-styled men of the centre do not always tolerate associated viewpoints – sometimes the very contrary: they claim that they themselves represent the consensus of public opinion, so that they have the People as well as Reason on their side, and that all ...”

“... and it is hard to see what Unionists could have done except resist Home Rule, not merely from self-interest, but from a purist belief that Home Rule was a corrupt bargain extracted from an already decadent imperial power. There are comparisons to be made here with the Boers in the 1890s and the public posture of Ian Smith’s Rhodesian Front. No wonder ...”

“... an object, reaches an emotional state in which the exclusive object of her psychic energy is the self’. There is something (more obvious than the words suggest) in that. In the world in which Jean Rhys grew up women were expected first to be pretty, then to flirt and finally to marry. But Mr Kennaway didn’t think she was pretty, Mr Gregg didn’t like ...”

“... of which the axioms were known, not through experiments, but through intuition, revelation and self-evidence. This kind of pure scientist felt one-up on a man who dissected dead animals – a snobbism which has lasted more than 300 years. He quotes Thomas Pratt, one of the founders of the Royal Society, writing in 1667: ‘The first thing that ought to be ...”

“... incapable of acting except foolishly, except when the occasion doesn’t require it, because he is self-bewilderingly odd. There is a character who claims to have no father, only a grandfather, and when that is called an odd omission, cannot see why: he is a type of all Gerhardie’s sympathetic characters, and nearly all of them are sympathetic. The ...”

“... All the quirks and feats of learning, the vaulting ambition of thought, the imperiousness of self-assertion, are grist to Carey’s mill. But the mill produces flour which is actually ground-up millstone. To ask for bread is then assuredly to be given a stone. The poetry is admired for being callous, brutal and pitiless. For Carey hates the thought of ...”

“... themselves and each other, and what happens when events force them ‘to the point where those self-preserving misunderstandings crumble’. From the beginning, when Brabantio before the Venetian Senate reaches out for witchcraft and sorcery to explain his daughter’s elopement, rather than face the fact that she now cares for someone else more than for ...”

“... with the Pole. Living things stretch their being across immense spaces, and huge energies of the self peter out in a friendly handshake with the cosmos: so the Snow-Shoe Hare meets the Moon and the White Bear embraces all the North. In Logue’s Homer, the touch of whimsy springs from an inability to take the heroic seriously, even as a thing to attack. A ...”

“... America. Repudiating the ‘reformist’ policies of the continent’s Communist Parties, this self-proclaimed Leninist rejected, not only the urban proletariat, but also the peasantry, as the motive force of the revolution. For, far from living among the peasants ‘like fish in water’ (Mao), the revolutionary base ought to remain for ever on the ...”

“... family life could mesh with a fear that creation itself was in such jeopardy that any attempt at self-expression – whether in art, politics or religion – was irrelevant and even fatuous. You could imagine this dilemma inspiring a perverse comedy (think of Billy Wilder or Paul Thomas Anderson running it, let alone Preston Sturges) in which a respected ...”

“... at home there, or learned more than a few words of Welsh. But he seized on ‘being Welsh’ as a self-masking identity, intended to make him different, even mysterious, to his contemporaries. This strategy didn’t always convince. He certainly seemed English enough to his friends as he grew up and calmed down, emerging as a ...”

“... to focus on an activity so closely that they lose awareness of time, external surroundings and self-consciousness. Such experiences become autotelic, as the boundaries between self and activity fade.’ When, win or lose, Charlie and I reunite after a tournament game, he has the dazed look of a scuba diver resurfacing ...”

“... an interview with a successful entrepreneur with a public-school education and a charmingly self-deprecating manner who has built a niche business purveying high-end furniture, posh chocolate or some other reassuringly expensive indicator of taste.The authors assume that this wealth elite has ‘real power’ because it combines ‘positional power and ...”

“... to Strozzi, which are full of assurances that the plan is proceeding swimmingly, interspersed with self-serving excuses for why the painting is not yet in his possession. At one point he claims to have leaped from the roof of the Palazzo della Signoria, landing unhurt in a conveniently parked hay cart below, as if he were Errol Flynn or Buster Keaton. Never ...”