“... need. For those readers who have little to show for the hours they spend here – how do you prove self-improvement? – the pale oak, travertine, black leather and brass, the comfort and grandeur, may bring a twinge of guilt. If the intention had been to site the library in a place which would emphasise the spectrum of privilege/misery in this country no ...”

“... while the audience was packed with enraged veterans waving flags, wild-eyed alien abductees and self-proclaimed victims of satanic ritual abuse. ‘You didn’t have a single ally in there,’ Nancy said to me after the show as we waited for an armed guard to escort us to her car. ‘Lady, you have balls!’ In New York the next morning, I ended the tour ...”

“... vision: the external world is inseparable from the sensibility that contemplates it. Passages of self-revelation contained within a larger subject show the growing confidence of her poetic voice. She makes her bleeding heart a pageant for England as Byron supposedly did for all Europe, and includes her personal history, motherhood, family quarrels, debts and ...”

“... give up hope ... I’ve read two books by Baroness Von Sutton Pam and What became of Pam.’ The self-importance of the Anglican and Roman Catholic chaplains kept from her the cleric she had asked to see. Then, a few days after her 29th birthday, her appeal was turned down. Edith Thompson’s hair went grey; she had to be continually dosed with morphia. She ...”

“... concern with its own historical appropriations and Quinn’s parallel affair with the word involve self-consciousnesses which distract us from the clearly urgent claims of Albany’s evolution and agonies. Quinn’s admission that he does not expect to solve the ‘mysteries’ of his life sounds humble enough, but it may be associated with an element of ...”

“... critical, takes a more measured view. The great merit of Said’s book, he says, was to shake the self-satisfaction of many Orientalists, challenging their claim to academic neutrality. But Said’s critique was, he believes, too sweeping, and Said loaded the dice by choosing as his targets only British and French Orientalists – the representatives of big ...”

“... date, contrives once again to convey original scientific insights excitingly and readably. It is a self-confessedly passionate exposition and defence of Darwinian evolutionary theory against all-comers. Avoiding the awful condescension of so much popular science-writing, which simply assumes that non-specialists cannot be entrusted with the assessment of ...”

“... fashion. Critics on his own side may sometimes see him as a ‘bloody pest’, but in reality his self-chosen role, always underrated in party politics, is that of the candid friend. It has cost him advancement. He had no sooner achieved long-coveted rank as a Front Bench spokesman (on science) than he was dismissed by Michael Foot, then Labour ...”

“... America comes into the act with recent scholarship arguing that Christopher Columbus – in his self-appointed task as Christoferens, of Christ-bearer – relied heavily on works which connected great conjunctions with change in empires. He noted the rulership of Saturn over India, and copied out a passage of a work deriving from Bacon which said that the ...”

“... on the other, the pompous use of native traditions for the moral improvement of the citizens of a self-consciously modern state. These were the two faces of Meiji, which suggest less a dichotomy than a fundamental ambivalence: Westernisation – in the slogan of the day, Enlightenment and Civilisation – was undertaken to defend Japan against the West, not ...”

“... in Asia and the Pacific, as events proved only too clearly in 1942. But, despite the brash self-confidence Vidal describes, the USA would not have undertaken Antipodean defence, and British withdrawals would only have increased Japanese ambitions. Nor can one predict the effects of US withdrawals today. President Carter’s efforts to pull US Forces ...”

“... of someone like Jérôme Lindon, founding editor at Editions de Minuit, Girodias comes across as a self-serving hustler and Trocchi as his willing pimp. It is unclear what makes Trocchi’s story worth telling in the first place. He was a bit-player with a very large ego, and basically irrelevant to anything that might pass for understanding ‘post-war ...”

“... cataclysmic change. In England, the Wars of the Roses were the favoured candidate, bringing the self-destruction of the feudal nobility and clearing the way for the arrival of the Tudors and their non-feudal servants. More recently, the emphasis has been on earlier, gradual change, in which feudal assessments are replaced by Parliamentary taxation or the ...”

“... scarcely developed. It remained a novelty style. Pugin’s father, the French émigré artist and self-styled count, Auguste Charles, had published books of Gothic details, drawn to scale from medieval buildings, that contributed to a better understanding of historic design. But Pugin Senior was still quite happy to design fire irons with handles in the shape ...”

“... perhaps Mediterranean), but this now-common noun turns out to have started life as an acronym for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. Interpol, too, is an abbreviation (for International Criminal Police Commission), and why it took from its founding in 1923 to the early Fifties to get itself into the OED is one of those mysteries that its own ...”