“... study power close up. An interview was arranged. Van Middelaar has a highly developed sense of self-presentation, which he likes to dramatise. Introducing Politicide a decade later, he would write: ‘My book did not pass unnoticed. It was a surprise that an unknown 26-year-old should unexpectedly dare to challenge consecrated French thinkers. Without ...”

“... are investigated every year. But it appears also to be a vestige of 150 years of professional self-regulation, which came to an end as recently as the 1990s. There is still an assumption that difficulties should be dealt with quietly and privately by a trusted caste of physicians: after an incident, even an avoidable death, hospitals and doctors are ...”

“... Oliver’), and offers me a cigarette. There is also in the monologue an in-built tendency to self-indulgence. Oliver’s laboured metaphor – ‘Life is like invading Russia’ – goes on for ten lines. It is justified, I suppose, as an insight into Oliver’s thought-habits. It is, as he puts it, one of his ‘riffs’. But when do people actually ...”

“... is finite but unbounded is based on his plumping for Euclidean space-time. Admittedly, he avoids self-contradiction by associating Euclidean space-time with ‘quantum gravity’ which goes beyond ‘everyday quantum mechanics’, but he just passes over the promotion of Euclidean space-time from a mathematical device to a physical reality. I am not ...”

“... American Right brings one inevitably back to Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary. For grandiose self-regard, pomposity of expression and insistence on seeing himself as a martyr and/or unhonoured prophet, Podhoretz is in a class of his own. One marvels at the conceit of an article like the one entitled ‘J’ Accuse’ (Commentary, September 1982), which ...”

“... you see Buckingham!’ Re-read Chapter 47 of Great Expectations. Pip, like many a hero of more self-consciously paranoid novels, has a feeling that he is being followed but has so far failed to catch a glimpse of his pursuer. He visits a Thamesside theatre where his friend Mr Wopsle, an earnest but unsuccessful actor, is appearing in a mixed ...”

“... Woody Allen, Kingsley Amis, Anon, John Aubrey, Auden and Ayckbourn. An Auden parody is called ‘Self-Congratulatory Ode ...’, but it is the purr of mutual congratulation which is deafening. ‘Parody is frequently welcomed by its victims, who recognise it as a compliment, however backhanded.’ Christopher Reid touches on all this, not backhandedly but ...”

“... brother: ‘a look of bruised innocence, of anxious love’. Later she writes of ‘the sullen, self-inflicted pain of blame’ shared by her and her siblings – the legacy, we are to suppose, of their Catholicism, of a father sentimentally committed to melancholy and of a mother who was unhappy because she could not pursue a middle-class way of life in ...”

“... of nature (unfair) or of art (deceitful). But their deepest objection seems to be to the urge for self-creation that women express through clothes, make-up and dieting. This has to be wrong because it is done for the benefit of the oppressor – the male sex. How to explain, then, the importance of beauty in the gay world? Lakoff and Scherr argue that gay men ...”

“... is, accordingly, already a homeland for Palestinian Arabs: it is Jordan. When those Arabs ask for self-determination they are absurdly asking for something they already have; their claim was settled in 1922, and they have no right to Judea and Samaria (what they call the West Bank) or indeed to Gaza. In 1948 Abdullah actually wanted to call the new Arab state ...”

“... disgust is tracking me, like an impossible choice between that naval bullishness and a harmless self-esteem pricking in these pastures. You know that story – or poem is it? – about the fighter crashing near a spinster village? It tells you straight how that orchid privacy – the fine asparagus mind of some high civil servant – must turn in the end to ...”

“... on the cultural divide. What he said in the 1959 Rede Lecture seemed to me to be so reasonable and self-evident that I found the dissent of Leavis and others surprising in its passion and sincerity, and, even more, its imprecision and lack of focus. But with this book Snow himself missed an opportunity to straddle the two cultures. In the early part of this ...”

“... bulbs from one VIP airport lounge to another. Especially as it is not always easy to share their self-pity: that, in their depths, both Sellers and Burton were racked with nostalgia for the great days of Major Bloodnok and Henry V, and also with regret at having come so far to have arrived nowhere as good, is something with which we can only briefly ...”

“... of frivolity because it had nothing more to offer than common sense.’ Ah. He practises the usual self-compiler’s device of using his introduction to review his book: ‘I hope that the truly serious reader will be able to detect, in even the least grave of the following essays, a certain disinclination to make cheap jokes, or at any rate a determination to ...”

“... It makes one yearn to collapse at once between linen sheets smoothed by Mrs Stephen and give one-self up in gratitude to the calm, unhurried, reassuring presence, the therapeutic rubbings and the beef tea. The section on the removal of crumbs from the bed is a masterpiece. This is the voice of a woman for whom the unsentimental alleviation of distress in ...”