“... of his own political inclinations, his Toryism; Waverley is his wryly-observed romantic boyhood self; Bradwardine, Oldbuck or even Sir Arthur Wardour are himself playing at ancestor worship and finicky antiquarianism. Ruefully but firmly, the follies of such characters are seen in the plain light of contemporary common day. They pay a price when they give ...”

“... would say he was older than they are, and hungrier; at once more astute and purposeful and less self-serving; that his social roots were at least one-and-a-half classes below theirs; that he is a Huck to their Tom. On both sides in different ways, their relationship depends on guilt, weakness, secrecy and inequality. They seem at times to be little more ...”

“... of mistakes,’ Lawson told the House of Commons in his resignation speech in 1989. Alas, the self-abasing passages, replete with abject contrition, which readers will naturally expect, have so far eluded me. But it can be reported immediately that Lawson’s fear, back in 1987, that ‘I might have made the wrong choice of Chief Secretary after ...”

“... great; the best one can say for you on that score, is that you’re unbalanced!’ Unyielding self-control gave Noel an integrity of character that attracted to her a long series of wobbly and histrionic young men, of whom Rupert was only the most extreme case. They all had to cope, as best they could, with her steady refusal to reciprocate the desires ...”

“... and on the way in which all football-related sorrow and upset are merely forms of operatic self-pity. The amalgamation of the specific and the general is very skilful. At one point, an account of Cambridge United v. Orient (4 November 1978, a 3-1 win for the home team) becomes, via the birth of a pre-match ritual that has to do with biting the heads ...”

“... symbol. The result is Our Vampires, Ourselves, a book whose title plays on that of the feminist self-help manual published in the early Seventies, and which aspires to be ‘a history of Anglo-American culture through its mutating vampires’. ‘To the jaded eye, all vampires seem alike,’ but, Auerbach reminds us, they are wonderfully various: ‘Some ...”

“... the fourth fragment, I’m tempted to answer that the voice is that of Walt Whitman, the great self-styled ‘bard’ who classed Ossian with the Bible, and who thought that Red Jacket, one of the great Iroquois orators, was ‘like one of Ossian’s ghosts’. Whitman grew his long lines out of Macpherson’s cadenced prose. A multitude of European and ...”

“... cards or cleaning equipment in the hut that served as a barrack room,’ Annan writes of his young self and his fellow officer-cadets in 1940, ‘when the sergeant came in and pinned a notice on the door.’ The effect of this distancing is to create a vacuum at the centre of the book, where one would expect to find the author, and the strain even tells on ...”

“... to her book. There is a sense in which her nomadic lifestyle and private nature mean that her own self ‘escapes human detection’. Something of the spirit of fire remains in her. In the months following the lightning strike the lobby of a hotel bursts into flames as she enters it, a plane catches fire in front of her on the runway, a forest fire starts up ...”

“... and journalists are too histrionic to carry conviction: but in the theatre, eccentricity and self-indulgence are everyone’s legitimate stock-in-trade. The individual flamboyance of Davies’s characters contrasts with the neutrality of the public sphere that contains them. An Englishwoman remarks, in What’s bred in the bone, that ‘Canada is an ...”

“... is ill-founded, if not completely mad. That said, he writes of our monkey forebears with such wit, self-irony and winning narrative that his whole story (however loony) makes a much better read than the sober, earnest David Attenborough-style version. Take ‘brachiation’, for example – the ability that some monkeys acquired about 15 million years ago to ...”

“... The MNF’s presence was highly controversial and subject to conflicting interpretations. Its self-proclaimed goal was vague and, with hindsight, absurdly optimistic: to protect the innocent from slaughter and oversee a return to some kind of normality. Others, perhaps casting their minds back to 1958 when US Marines landed at Beirut to fight off ...”

“... like this keeps you alert. Les Murray is a rarity, a poet with a gift of the gab used not for self-regarding rhetoric but for storytelling, a man writing with unstrained and often moving eloquence about the places and people of his native New South Wales. He offers a possible answer to the teasing question: ‘Does Australian poetry exist?’ Exist, that ...”

“... Berners phenomenon. Nor would Berners himself have complained. The character Lord Fitzcricket, a self-portrait, in his novel Far from the Madding War (1941), is described as ‘astute enough to realize that, in Anglo-Saxon countries, art is more highly appreciated if accompanied by a certain measure of eccentric publicity’. This fitted in well with his ...”

“... Mussolini that Greece was weak and that his invasion plans were perfect. He was inordinately self-confident, even while failing to ensure the most elementary logistical preparations – mules, for instance, essential in the mountains. When the ill-equipped Greeks resolutely stopped his chaotic offensive and vigorously attacked in turn, Italian morale ...”