“... whom Lord David Cecil declared to be ‘a great man’, yet who seems to have had only a minimal self-knowledge and who had a capacity for getting things ‘plumb wrong’ in human relationships. It was certainly a man of unusual talent who produced some sixty books, including English Literature in the 16th Century, excluding Drama, the famous books of ...”

“... fecoventilatory collision’, which alone of the words I have cited seems to be more or less self-explanatory, unless you know Greek, Japanese and the presumably upmarket slang to which the dictionary refers in defining ‘mopery’. This lexical work is not the only trial of the reader’s education or ingenuity. One has also to guess what it means, for ...”

“... As Duchess of York and later as Queen, Elizabeth lent ‘Bertie’ strength and boosted his self-confidence (whereas Wallis only made Edward more feebly dependent on herself). Yet he showed considerable strength and will-power of his own in determining to marry Elizabeth in the first place, overcoming the discouragement of two refusals to win her in the ...”

“... only escape Keenan could contrive was the kind familiar to writers. ‘I decided to become my own self-observer, caring little for what I did or said, letting madness take me where it would as long as I stood outside it and watched it. I would be the voyeur of myself. This strategy I employed for the rest of my time in captivity.’ Another, equally ...”

“... though there is a mass of autobiographical material, the accounts are often contradictory and self-confessedly unreliable. On the other hand, the key to Simenon’s life, he contends, lies in the pattern formed by these contradictions and distortions of reality. In the main Marnham’s analysis is subtle, perceptive and ...”

“... was simply a KGB-promoted myth: Philby, he said then, was motivated by ‘his calculating, self-contained cynicism’. Has Costello now fallen for the KGB myth or simply changed his mind? Some things are new, however, and fascinating. Many have suspected that Melinda Maclean knew more of Donald’s work for the KGB than she ever admitted. Tsarev and ...”

“... have (along with Reg Greer) a good deal in common. They are suburban, dull and rather idiotically self-important. They lurk behind their achieving offspring like guilty secrets. The problem is that the generations born this century have more than Freud to deal with when trying to define themselves against their background. There is the fact of DNA to be taken ...”

“... Nor is this hunger for ‘media exposure’ (as the spin doctors would call it) entirely due to self-love on the part of individual peers. For the thing that must eventually strike all visitors to the House of Lords is the obsession of its members, whether Labour or Tory, hereditary aristocrats or proletarian life peers, with the survival of the place in ...”

“... dope, spinelessness and pen-pushing in a railway station. Like his creator, Percy is a dissolute, self-destructive figure given to grotesque fits of passion; unlike him he is beautiful, powerful and prodigiously gifted, a haughty, arch-revolutionary Übermensch who – like Branwell himself before he ran out of drink money – arrogantly refuses to serve. The ...”

“... for example, misses the whole point of current debates about the canon: ostensible self-selection is what is at issue, far more than the particular names that finally end up on the list. The word ‘arguably’, tirelessly used by Prendergast, is probably a teaching tic, a way of seeming to allow room for the discussion you’re not going to ...”

“... good and evil. A large part of the cultural revival in Scots political writing has consisted of self-punishing examinations of the loss of specialness and excellence as a result of the encroachment of ‘metropolitan culture’. George Davie, in his Democratic Intellect, argued that Anglicisation had destroyed much that was of distinctive value in the Scots ...”

“... not illegal. Unlike Jimmy Carter, he had no sympathy whatever with Palestinian claims to national self-determination. On the PLO, Reagan also followed the Israeli line that it was a terrorist organisation pure and simple and that negotiating with it was totally out of the question. He even adopted the Israeli position towards the Camp David accords, stating ...”

“... at the expense of the Boeing company’. Whether Boeing was dangerously introverted, admirably self-reliant, or simply blessed with an enlightened management tradition, you nevertheless gain a sense that only by not having America and the world watching you (and making you aware of the extent of your undertaking) would you be able to carry through a ...”

“... all come out and it is time for me to begin that journey which will be simultaneously a voyage of self-discovery and an investigation of the state of England. I take the tube to Camden Town and from there walk over to the central avenue which runs along the edge of the Zoo. Nervous about venturing on strange territory, I consult the notice-board which ...”

“... capitalism save to overthrow it. There was no point in being a ‘currency crank’, as Strachey self-deprecatingly dubbed the author of Revolution by Reason. Between 1932 and 1938 he wrote five books which captured both the excitement and flexibility of the Marxist account. Strachey’s supreme quality was his clear prose style: there was no frill or swank ...”