“... following Jeanne Proust’s death. There is a bid for morbid glamour here, as well as a lot of self-pity, but there is a terrific, ongoing grief too, and what Henri van Blarenberghe offered Proust was the astonishing image of a man who had lost his mother rather than killed her – or rather lost her by killing her, since he didn’t know what he was ...”

“... in America, Britain and the Colonies swallowed the high-falutin’ classicism of their self-advertisements without the smallest particle of salt. Intoxicated by the glamour of their trade, they rummaged in reference books, delved into etymology, and eventually came up with a professional pedigree that stretched back into the mists of ...”

“... nothing personal about Woodward, his books, journalism and public presentation, little that’s self-revealing. But then the people he writes about, usually men who dress, as Woodward does, in dark suits, plain ties and light blue shirts, the better to be observed on TV – they never reveal much of themselves.What is known about Woodward? He’s a former ...”

“... the Jew-hating of Time’s Arrow (1991), the class loathing of London Fields (1989), the self-loathing of Money (1984) – but in trying to address Islamofascism his resources fail him. He hates so much that he can’t begin to see what it is that the haters hate. Amis used to have a means of rebutting a vicious argument: a single rhetorical ...”

“... enormous influence on the Islamic revivalist movement. Published in 1964, it is a contradictory, self-referential, anti-semitic tract that calls for war against the non-Islamic world to establish a universal Islam, following which the conquered – or, as Qutb puts it, liberated – will be free to believe what they wish. Qutb insists that the world – not ...”

“... were the words notoriously used by Herbert Morrison when he rejected the idea of self-government for some colonies in 1943: it would be like giving these things, he said, to ‘a child of ten’.) Britain needed to have completed the job. But that emphatically wasn’t the situation in most colonial territories. Before 1938, and excepting ...”

“... that lasted three days. The ‘ancient sickness’ seems to be something to do with illusion and self-deception, a desire for big, grand, romantic living when, actually, you are small and poor. Elisa’s mother, Anna, has it, and so has her father, Francesco, which is one reason both of them love Edoardo, a beautiful, spiteful young aristo. Edoardo dies of ...”

“... if you do not behave yourselves as you ought’.There are also moments of compelling silliness and self-indulgence, where Swift goes above and beyond what’s strictly required by the political question. Explaining the concept of hyperinflation, the Drapier comes up with a run of images of debased coinage:If a ’squire has a mind to come to town to buy ...”

“... that it is impossible for black people to gain dignity without their white oppressors losing self. It may be that those Americans who emigrated joyfully and hopefully from the old America of the 1940s into the new America of civil rights were outnumbered by those who came as refugees from the past. ‘When we left the old country, we were forced to leave ...”

“... work involved in cross-pollinating wheat:If you want to cross two plants, you must prevent self-fertilisation by opening the tiny scales of the floret, and with a pair of fine tweezers plucking the three anthers without losing any of the pollen in the process. Then in a day or two, when the stigma is mature (it will resemble a plume), you add pollen to ...”

“... view, literary studies became a discipline. But the attempt to turn criticism into a regulated and self-replicating profession generated all kinds of tensions, and Guillory urges that many of the issues agitating the field in recent decades are best seen as a working out of these tensions. For example, ‘criticism’ never quite shook off the aspiration to be ...”

“... of Mason & Dixon is more than a century more inchoate, and so is the world around it. The ‘self-evident truths’ which codify the Rights of Man would not be declared on that continent until 1774. They would not be declared in Europe until 1789.Over the entirety of the novel, barely a line sets out to delineate a sense of historical period in the way I ...”

“... fractures of 1956, when people in the ‘developing world’ sided with Algeria’s struggle for self-determination, while Western countries backed Hungary’s resistance to Soviet invasion.) In countries that fought to overcome colonial rule, white domination and apartheid, the Palestinian struggle for independence, in conditions of grotesque ...”

“... a suit – ‘I sell a lot of these suits to your sort of people’ – even though the jacket is self-evidently too small for him. Then the man’s baby starts to cry, and Barny wanders over to the cot. ‘What a lovely little picaninny,’ he oozes. Racism is Barny’s business plan. ‘I’m using me brains to the best of me ability,’ he ...”

“... complains that the young Newman was more ‘mannered’ than Brando. ‘He seems to me an uneasy, self-regarding personality, as if handsomeness had left him guilty.’ The impression given by the memoir is that handsomeness caused him not guilt but shame. The prettier he was, the more he was the creature his narcissistic mother wanted him to be, which was ...”