“... election that would finally do for the Conservatives. It was a game Brown was sucked into by the self-confident tyros who surround him, but was played so elaborately and ham-fistedly that they were almost certain to lose. (Most people knew that nothing was more likely to unite the Tories than the prospect of an election.) In the first two or three months of ...”

“... Pei-Ming, a sadistic burst of fleshy pinks and reds from Yang Shaobin, and a sinister, denatured self-portrait (see left) by Yue Minjun, the most fashionable of them all. ‘It would be worth taking a few hits on that stuff,’ I heard a dealer mutter to his assistant, ‘just to break into the Chinese market.’ At Christie’s in St James’s for the ...”

“... else happens, and then spring arrives. ‘In a typical poem,’ Ruefle writes of her work in ‘Self-Criticism’ (2016), ‘a woman is sitting alone doing absolutely nothing. She notices a fly crawling across the table and strikes up a conversation with him. Something terribly dramatic happens, and the poem ends.’ This is fairly accurate, except that ...”

“... the arrival of the Fifth Republic in 1958, the MRP split over his announcement of a referendum on self-determination in Algeria. The party’s long-standing leader, Georges Bidault, joined the paramilitary OAS, which launched armed resistance against de Gaulle in the name of Algérie française and narrowly failed to assassinate him, while his colleagues in ...”

“... multiplying range of personae. It’s curious that this man, so conspicuously lacking an authentic self, evidently regarded his single most authentic feature as a curse and a stigma. After Lillian Rose was born in April 2005, Rachel grew homesick and Neil, whose weakness for shopworn slogans is abundantly on display on his websites, embraced the idea of moving ...”

“... at the Edinburgh conference in 1974: for legal and financial independence, and for the right to a self-defined sexuality and an end to discrimination against lesbians. A seventh demand was passed at the final conference in Birmingham in 1978: for freedom for all women from intimidation by the threat or use of violence or sexual coercion regardless of marital ...”

“... or promissory notes that would go begging in their own country. The Axial Age launches a self-reinforcing pact of coin and sword. Payment of soldiers in precious metal encourages further plunder of neighbouring lands for their bullion; conquest of these lands disrupts local economies functioning on credit and trust, as occupying powers demand that ...”

“... Abrams show in Kubrick: An Odyssey, owed his escape to a coalescence of luck and preternatural self-confidence.Kubrick is a comprehensive Life. It yields, in orderly procession, almost every fact a scholar or a fan might want; and a fair number of motifs are traced between one film and another, and between Kubrick’s experience and what went into his ...”

“... purpose and experience in Vietnam and beyond, but only O’Brien’s book, a work of fiction, is self-consciously so. All three books were published near a date that has far more significance than the 20th anniversary of the reunification of Vietnam and the final, cataclysmic withdrawal of American forces from Saigon – 30 April 1975. April 30 1995 was also ...”

“... least by the Continental regime she most disliked, which sat in Rome. The otherwise impregnable self-confidence of The Downing Street Years falters disarmingly whenever its heroine comes to Europe. The titles of the chapters speak for themselves. The ordinary triumphal run – ‘Falklands: The Victory’, ‘Disarming the Left’, ‘Hat Trick’, ‘Not ...”

“... got at, as I did when I had to do a poetry reading for Amis in 1976, though then it was his self-consciously chappish manner I found hardest to cope with, never knowing if it was piss-taking quite. It’s stated in the book that Denis Brogan, fellow of Peterhouse, broadcaster and expert on the USA, used to boast that he had fucked in 46 of the 50 ...”

“... et arbre, quartier de l’Hermitage, and declare the balance of risk and ambition in the two self-evident. Comparisons of this sort have been the staple of art writing for a century. And of course the writers had a point. The style Cézanne can be seen building from 1873, out of the Pissarro materials, is in the end more turbulent and perplexing than ...”

“... to see and touch, to believe in the humiliation of Vladimir Putin. There are tanks, a huge self-propelled howitzer and armoured troop carriers into whose burned-out insides everyone peeks to see if their occupants have left something of themselves behind. The hulks are both disturbing and ridiculous, redolent of death and of hubris. The great slabs of ...”

“... a union organiser; he had published his poetry here and there; he would turn out to be a nuanced, self-conscious diarist, often introspective, self-mocking, good on the absurdities he encountered, and not always laconic under fire. He had an excellent eye for detail. At the same time he was brusque and untutored in his ...”

“... Tony Blair emerges from these memoirs as a man of extraordinary intellectual self-confidence. He likes to think for himself, and decide for himself, whatever the issue. He takes this to be one of the key attributes of leadership, and it is why he believes he was cut out for it while other people (you can guess who) were not ...”