“... revealing: both men seem to have put down their dreams straightforwardly and with the minimum of self-conscious fuss, while Ruskin is especially impressive, recording his nightmares, many of them horrible, with a stoical grace that touches the heart. Even when Ruskin has a rare pleasant dream, the account of it is suffused with his authentic ...”

“... when they themselves sponsored ‘new men’ for admission, the most famous, or at least the most self-advertised, of whom was Cicero. But the offices of state were few in number, and as they became, with Roman expansion, increasingly lucrative for the incumbents, they were the object of a fierce and costly competition, the oddity of which was that they were ...”

“... bad, but the poet himself is sentimentalised out of recognition; and he’s there as a totem of self-pity, addressed as a fellow-sufferer in the galleys of Grub Street: How to survive; that’s all we want to know. But you didn’t, did you? We don’t use exile as a punishment in Mother England now, not physical exile anyway, presumably because there is ...”

“... out as minders for the cargo that doesn’t exist – so does his prose. The writing is rich in self-reference. Ralph is both himself then and himself now, the boy who knows the secret (but no one will listen), the man who’s looking back, taking the bird’s-eye view (an albatross!): ‘There is a faintness and nausea ... It did not happen as I have ...”

“... his crippled son Jimmy feature as comic characters. The play is otherwise a serious piece with a self-conscious social message. Jim was in Zurich, and the play was probably not seen by his father: neither had any interest in social messages. The son was too absorbed by his kith and kin, and by a vanished day in distant Dublin, to care about such ...”

“... to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its unnatural connection with Spain and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which, by the same law of nature, cannot cast her off from its bosom. A helpful ally, mother nature, and if she’s not too sure about the timing of the tempest, she can always be helped out. One ...”

“... is not a liberal man. His present pessimism is, one suspects, the disillusionment of someone whose self-promoted wisdom is foolishly no longer heeded by those in charge. The only role left to him is that of the reactionary Jeremiah. I spent most of Thursday morning listening to the radio, waiting for the British Government’s formal response to the IRA ...”

“... minorities towards acts of emancipation. In Imperium the relationship between this drive towards self-determination at the margins and the crisis at the centre is anything but clear. Certainly, the élite – from Gorbachev down – failed to react in time to the accumulating force of nationalist claims within the empire. But it was only one among the many ...”

“... tied to a ‘risk of being overwhelmed by the urgency of their impulses’. They suffer from low self-esteem and relative egocentricity. Under stressful conditions, ‘at least six of the nine showed a potential for more or less transient psychotic experiences ... with confused and disordered thinking that can be bizarre, peculiar, or very primitive and ...”

“... military power, not their strength. The connection between politics and economics seems to be self-evident and independent of the nature of economic systems. That the connection was operating in the process of Late Victorian imperialism is undeniable, but that process can be more sensibly ascribed to the economics, and power, of advanced industrialisation ...”

“... heavy with the burden of an essayed reference and lose the proper ludic frigidity of the truly self-referential work. But Dr Cave is elusive. At the very end of the book, in a weird and oddly touching sentence, he suggests that the real appeal of anagnorisis may lie in its power to satisfy our nostalgia for the particular, for piecemeal practical ...”

“... Signal Company. The authors note a tendency for women, having achieved the right to wear a self-designed uniform, to individualise it according to fancy. Out of uniform, there were women mine-workers, mule-exercisers, sand-blasters, chimney-sweeps, and sorters of deloused garments from the trenches. Especially arresting is the picture of a top-hatted ...”

“... the concept of the cookery book as literary form – part recipes, part travel book, part self-revelation, part art object. Now, some thirty years on, she has assembled what may be its culmination. Honey from a Weed is less a cookery book than a summing-up of the genre of the late modern British cookery book. It is a book like very few ...”

“... has called the ‘herd’ instinct of the market ensured that the fall, once started, became self-reinforcing. However, this mechanistic explanation throws no light on why there should have been a sudden reversal of sentiment in the market. Because our understanding of the workings of the stock market and its impact on the economy is so imperfect, it ...”

“... it April the First. But who was the fool? Them for not checking me, or me for hiding myself in a self-destroying disguise? They wanted a photograph for the cover. They wanted a biographical note. All the time the worry persisted that it wasn’t the stories they were buying, it was Rahila Khan. I was by now beginning to work with an agent. She had approached ...”