“... and exterior had become indistinguishable. Tumbledown shacks contained ailing Land Rovers, self-cannibalising motorcycles and birds of prey in various stages of recuperation: an owl, a saker falcon, a chug and several common buzzards. A protective wall was constructed from corrugated iron and plasterboard. The corrugated iron rhymes very elegantly with ...”

“... how much that excited him, and how he struggled, though willingly, to keep up with the pace of self-liberation set by Wollstonecraft. The two met in 1791, at a dinner for Thomas Paine, where they quarrelled; four and a half years later, boldly, brazenly even, Wollstonecraft called uninvited on Godwin, and their affair began. Godwin even wrote her a love ...”

“... the rich-bastard-favouring cut in the 50 per cent income tax rate; all these combined to make as self-evident and immediate a cock-up as anyone could remember. Six months later, it looked even worse. That’s because the economic outlook has continued to darken. One of the first things Osborne did as chancellor was to set up a new body, the Office of Budget ...”

“... Speaker after speaker had begun to attack them by name. Wang was even forced to present a ‘self-criticism’ acknowledging his past political sins. When Deng showed up, there was little left to say. He was offered the party’s leading position on the spot, and knowing full well what had transpired in his absence, he took it. We know less about what ...”

“... There is the same feeling, in the statement to Murry, of the mental engine turning – abstractly self-tormenting – with the same preoccupation, and the same circularity, that would surface in the Sweeney poems: Any man has to, needs to, wants to Once in a lifetime, do a girl in … He didn’t know if he was alive and the girl was dead He didn’t know if ...”

“... operatives abducted 12 men from a hotel in Abuja, the federal capital. All were members of the self-styled government of the Republic of Ambazonia, Africa’s latest secessionist movement in neighbouring Cameroon, and all were refugees in Nigeria, some of long standing, among them Sisiku Julius Ayuk Tabe, the would-be president of the aspiring ...”

“... in peacetime. A substantial package guaranteed the same percentage of wage income for most of the self-employed. There is probably more to come. In each announcement, Sunak has repeated the same mantra: ‘whatever it takes’.His calm and authoritative presentation has won him praise from those alarmed by Johnson’s shambling improvisation. Unlike the ...”

“... it, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. With tragic and (in literary history) unparalleled self-delusion, he thought Sordello would be a popular success, and he was devastated by the farmyard chorus that greeted its appearance. Just as the critics accused him of wilful disregard for his readers, so he accused them of wilful laziness and ill-will. ‘My ...”

“... into which Moorcock has inserted himself: Bastrop, Texas. A good place not to go out from. A self-curated mausoleum of memories: photographs, toys, magazines, William Morris wallpaper, Arts and Crafts furniture; a library of Victorian and Edwardian fiction, Stevenson, Meredith, Wells, Conrad, W. Pett Ridge. Moorcock, with his sacred cats in a ...”

“... defined type of dementia called vascular dementia. Those of us not affected yet, either in self or family, tend to equate Alzheimer’s with memory loss, and that is what Rose inevitably emphasises. We forget the ‘agitation, aggression, hallucinations, delusions and other behavioural and psychiatric symptoms of Alzheimer’s’: I am quoting from the ...”

“... uneasiness about motive: is the denouncer the patriot that he claims to be, or is he acting out of self-interest and a wish to settle personal scores? The rhetoric of civic virtue with which governments (and schools, prisons and other closed institutions) surround denunciation coexists with a subaltern counter-discourse in which denunciation is an act of ...”

“... to make claims that are simply unsourced. Perhaps they think these are conclusions that flow self-evidently from the pattern of events. They include claims that Stalin deliberately kept his ambassador away from the Security Council meeting in June 1950 which authorised a UN response to North Korea’s invasion of the South, because he wanted to draw US ...”

“... knowledge almost, rather than opinion. Brilliantly expounded, with cracking pace and unflappable self-confidence, the book is a mine of information and an indispensable primer to anyone who comes to the subject fresh and ready to make a new conquest, just as it is an extraordinarily adept configuration of the field for those who may come to the subject weary ...”

“... were the qualities she most respected, the same qualities that characterised her own noble life of self-deprivation. What moved Marianne North in middle age to begin her succession of solitary journeys that was to extend over nearly fifteen years, from 1871 to 1885, and to take her to Canada and the United States, Jamaica, South ...”

“... tons of equipment, barely broke even). Crucial to their advancement was Michael Tretow, a young, self-taught studio whizz who engineered all of their hits. In 1972, after reading a book about Phil Spector he’d chanced on in a Stockholm bookshop, Tretow secretly overdubbed the backing track of ‘Ring Ring’, the band’s soon-to-be first hit, tweaking the ...”