“... are out to get you – they being a cabal comprising the Government and the medical establishment (self-appointed ‘guardians of public morality’) which is both powerful and evil. There is, of course, nothing new in radicals – or reactionaries, for that matter – spotting conspiracies where others see epidemics: no less a man of the people than William ...”

“... had more than a little of the flavour of breakfast with the Borgias. The Federation was run by a self-appointing oligarchy of the large firms using a voting system reminiscent of the Teamsters. David Morrell became one of the awkward squad with his Quixotic notion that construction companies should put in real tenders, related to what the jobs would ...”

“... by three lewd aunts and a brass band. An alternative commentary is provided by a gullible and self-important policeman, who, in the middle of the mayhem, announces his eagerness to chase after illegal importers of ‘French panties and English marmite’. This character is at times too much of a clown, with his droll delivery – his wife, having been ...”

“... the Thai nor the Pakistani Government is anxious to alienate its border tribes. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: drug-crop profits are used to bribe officials and to purchase arms, which brings increased independence, which allows still more opium poppies to be grown. Mills fingers a number of very high-up Thai and Panamanian government figures who ...”

“... for all of us’; and made him out to be somewhat like the ‘Saint’ in his tireless acts of self-effacing goodness on behalf of the community, noble but expressionless in the manner of Roger Moore. ‘He let loose a barrage of bullets that would be heard around the world’: Rubin quotes Emerson on the shot that opened the American War of ...”

“... and civilise reach a satisfying climax. He is, and seems always to have been, almost totally self-absorbed (few autobiographers can have evinced so little interest in their wives and children), a law-giver never in doubt about his mission. He ends his book surveying his handiwork, gazing up at the sixty-foot trees he planted twenty-five years ago, and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to London in her husband’s clothes, she follows him, abandoning husband, child and her normal self. From this, various horrors ensue, none of them entirely unpredictable but all of them shocking, which is as it should be in a novel about the pathos of predictability. The narrator’s faintly camp confidence is set against the horror of events; the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... if the Standard had allowed its financial independence to be corrupted, it never permitted its self-respect to be wholly disregarded. There can be no denying, though, that the Standard has had a chequered history, that even its glory days were not that glorious. Politically, it was on the wrong side on virtually everything: vehemently opposed to Catholic ...”

“... of the neck, and become the measure by which all the rest is found wanting. They confirm for the self-doubting reader that it is not he but the novelist whose batteries have needed recharging. Stories are commonly designed to make us hope for a particular ending; sometimes our wish is granted, sometimes not – either outcome, the happy or the sad, is ...”

“... was the ‘gardenesque’, and his rhetorical style, very much in the mode of Leigh Hunt, promoted self-advancement through the cultivation of a miniature estate which might ensure to humbler folk ‘everything that is worth having of the enjoyments of the wealthier classes’. The background of Keats’s Odes is the villa garden, which could include Grecian ...”

“... To be sure, Adams’s view was just as partisan (perhaps more so), and Franklin had a natural self-confidence guaranteed to drive a nervous man like Adams crazy. But Adams played more than a nuisance role: it was the effective combination of their contrasting temperaments that gave the final treaty its successful shape. Even this caveat makes Morgan’s ...”