“... scholarship and early anthropology. But all professions are jealous. As the IMS became more self-confident and hidebound, it fretted over the way in which the Company’s Indian soldiers and even deathly-ill Europeans continued to put themselves in the hands of Indian practitioners when in direst need. This, said one doctor, ‘can only throw undeserved ...”

“... I had the nerve.’ But the adrenalin that comes from these literary crimes creates a whole other self – he becomes a book collector. Walter Benjamin wrote of the different ways to acquire books: one could write them oneself, one could borrow them, ‘with its attendant non-returning’, one could buy them from catalogues, auctions or bookshops. He ...”

“... Left. Cockburn and Silverstein personalise politics to underline the gap between an exploitative, self-satisfied élite and the economically and politically disenfranchised. They are promoting an anti-royalist uprising. In spite of the one-sentence call to arms that ends Washington Babylon, however, it is the Right and not the Left that has capitalised ...”

“... like Sir Richard Burton, Lord Cromer, T.E. Lawrence, Gérard de Nerval and Renan, all good for self-damning soundbites, but whose influence on serious academic study of the history, languages and religions of the Middle East was pretty negligible. One cannot understand Lewis’s intellectual formation without looking at the more weighty academic ...”

“... of inconclusive intimacy, established through the frames of two windows. The new propensity for self-conscious theatricality that emerged in the early years of the century mixed in ensuing decades with the loquacious speech of various immigrant groups to create a culture of everyday, semi-public performance – comedic, pathetic, histrionic – which would ...”

“... Which prizes she won is not recorded – almost all the facts about her life come from a few self-serving interviews. There was nothing in Postmortem to indicate anything other than a modest break-even performance in a competitive field. Nor is there anything outstandingly innovative about Cornwell’s narrator-heroine. Kay Scarpetta is a ...”

“... paintings rather than sketching theories. It is hard to imagine a better introduction to the self-involvement of Klee’s pictures than a very early essay collected here; and the same power of explanation, augmented but not radically altered by experience, animates his later studies of Giacometti and Jasper Johns. He is most at home with the art of the ...”

“... was in Smyllie’s favourite Palace Bar in Dublin that he kept hearing tales of George Moore, that self-proclaimed peculiar man (‘I couldn’t be commonplace were I to try’). He could hardly have picked on a more slippery figure for a biography; a man whose three lively books of reminiscence were riddled with fantasy, who invented other people’s lives ...”

“... as I remember. Nothing came of it.’ Hobbs was as unimpressed as ‘the sort’: Wayne’s self-image as a yuppie gangster, dealing in coke and controlling his environment through his own use of the drug, is somewhat at odds with the spotty, slightly dishevelled figure in the saloon bar of the City Arms. Wayne’s skin is at once acne-scarred and ...”

“... ago lost any instinctive respect for monarchy. Charles Powell’s new portrait of Juan Carlos as a self-made monarch is generous in the degree of clairvoyance and sense of purpose he claims for a young man who had been feeling his way towards a parliamentary monarchy through the labyrinthine politics of latter-day Francoism; and his account of the King’s ...”

“... the horsepower of the market to social welfare and social justice, in functional rather than self-defeating ways, also forms part of that history. Maybe it is time to put the horse before the ...”

“... moral culture. Simply put, the idea was that each person should be engaged on the task of radical self-transformation in the direction of a ‘beautiful soul’, this being thought tantamount to moral perfection. Given Wittgenstein’s own heritage, it is very tempting to place him in this tradition. Certainly he often speaks as if his soul exists in some ...”

“... of people in Hollywood’. Hysteria is never far off.) The confidence isn’t quite real, but more self-kidding, slippery. Yet the picture (Kelly’s smile) is not a picture of it slipping, but of the grip it’s held in, the fist so tight it’s shaking. This, I suppose, is what people mean when they say they always thought Gene Kelly’s smile was ...”

“... many gay people; I was so busy being picked up on the beach. (I was rather unbalanced and very self-destructive.) I tell Arthur about Pirate Bill, whom I’d met in a bar; he’d invited me out on his boat, boasting that he’d been in prison for smuggling mercury. (Arthur points out that mercury is legal, so how could Pirate Bill have been smuggling ...”

“... is not. Hoare’s own rather tentative estimate of this ‘enormously talented man’ (Coward’s self-description, from which it is hard to dissent) has to be sought out, a sentence or two at a time, throughout these densely packed pages. Mainly the asides are critical: This Happy Breed was ‘an affecting tribute to a mythical England; a Cockney neoromantic ...”