“... of Airport Noise and Sleep Disturbance published in 1992 by the Department of Transport (and the self-serving and misleading use made of it by the Department), I had suffered no sleep disturbance from aircraft noise: I had merely been woken up and then kept awake by it. At 6 a.m. I resumed my record of the arrival of aircraft. While reading of the concern ...”

“... pensions and personal equity plans. He packages his wares in ways that flatter the customer’s self-image, making us feel gayer dogs than we are. And from his ‘Earls Court hippy’ days, Branson seems to have retained the knack of working communally, drawing on the creative talent of his subordinates. He is, it seems, a good man to work for and – more ...”

“... Thereafter he analyses all the quiddities you might dream up: the painted title itself; or the self-cancelling title which depends on a willingness to be arch; or titled titles, like Joseph Kosuth’s, where the art work is a text of some description, often a dictionary definition; or the literary satires of Situationism, handled here with deadpan ...”

“... focus is on Lenin the politician, the description of his personal characteristics – his total self-confidence, his phenomenal energy and powers of concentration, his ‘magpie-like’ capacity to absorb information – provides a much more plausible account of his extraordinary achievements than Volkogonov’s portrayal of a man out of his depth in ...”

“... however, Edith was the indispensable Sitwell. It is too soon to know how much of Walton’s self-critical, precisely-crafted music will outlast this century: the Viola, Violin and Cello Concertos, the two symphonies, Belshazzar, the Violin Sonata, the String Quartet perhaps. But Façade is secure, written at the age of 22, just as Mendelssohn once or ...”

“... command by virtue of status, and by exercising the virtues associated with that status: calm, self-confidence, courage, acceptance of responsibility and massive common sense. These were the qualities, not of the old feudal aristocracy which had destroyed itself by its competitive heroism, but of a service gentry, serving not their caste but the State, or ...”

“... things which makes it remarkable is the combination of a highly-wrought narrative surface with a self-consciously contrived structure. There’s an epigraph from George Herbert, and it is clear that McWilliam is attempting to bring together intellectual precision, technical ingenuity and unsettling resonance in the manner of some metaphysical poetry. A Case ...”

“... asks the shopkeepers for credit. Gert observes his elders with a child’s ice-clear, entirely self-centred accuracy. His grandfather, only just over sixty, can’t imagine dying; Gert can imagine his dying quite easily. He wears an artist’s hat – a black trilby, we’re in the mid-Twenties – and a broad gold wedding-ring which from time to time ...”

“... in one letter. ‘Hope not.’ It is only when his friend inadvertently strikes on this fugitive self-doubt, that Tynan rises to convincing nastiness: ‘You have never been to Oxford and as far as I know, you have no close acquaintance amongst Oxford men,’ he tells Holland, after Holland has dared to comment adversely on Tynan’s criticism of Romeo and ...”

“... hostel in a murderous conflagration. Old arrangements are cancelled, but at great cost. Karina, self-sufficient, scornful and patronised throughout her life, turns out to be fertile and merciless in unsuspected ways, with energies previously hidden from observation. She remains, to the end, an inscrutable figure – a monstrously cruel victim of her ...”

“... image of puzzled, hurt, battle-weary masculinity, the riders could easily have been ludicrous and self-pitying had Winton not proved himself capable, by this stage, of negotiating with such assurance between the physical and spiritual planes of his narrative. As it is, the image takes on a hard-won grandeur which reflects back on the book as a whole. For all ...”

“... which he never could be, for God and nature had been against him’. In other words, he was a self-advertising showman. However deep his Radicalism, it lacked both the historical depth of Catharine Macaulay’s and the authority of the natural rights theories that attracted Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft. One is left with the feeling that Wilkes ...”

“... a bash for executives of the music business: ‘I refuse to be used merely as photo fodder for the self-publicity of somebody whose party has no understanding of or compassion for the people of this country.’ In an election campaign timidly built on the values of Middle England and the Daily Mail, covert encouragement has been whispered to the ...”

“... process than all the political sleaze about which Labour has recently been so confidently self-righteous. What Labour in government will need is some positive agenda which is distinctively its own, to go with the Howard-speak that will be a necessary evil in the early days of a future government. Roy Jenkins had race and sex discrimination to ...”

“... as specially likeable or charismatic, Cook settles for an image of preoccupied aloofness. For him, self-mastery has higher ends: only a calm head can cope with the grave, complex issues he has been entrusted with. ‘Don’t break my concentration,’ seems to be his plea. ‘Our country needs it’. And usually this works. It does help, of course, that Cook ...”