“... The wacky Terry-Thomas fatuity of ‘Self-Portrait with a Speedboat’, a four-page monologue, a cross between Formula One and Those Magnificent Men, that seems to be a kind of revenge on television, on years of watching sponsored sporting drivel: The three of us hit the Guinness hairpin at about ...”

“... like to believe, ‘is not a whimsical judgment’, because according to him those ‘parodic, and self-parodic, elegies are technically among the finest poems Larkin wrote during the decade, with an assured delicacy of tone far beyond anything in The North Ship.’ Just as ‘Larkin, the mature poet, was later to transfigure the clichés of urban folklore and ...”

“... within as well as imposed from without. Interiors – the inner life of the home, but also of the self – are not outside history but places where history is made. This was literally brought home to me, as it usually is to the bereaved, when so many of my household habits no longer made any sense. It seemed as if the whole house had to be reincarnated, lived ...”

“... corporations in Nitassinan as ‘colonialism’. In the early days of colonialism, as part of the self-justifying process of presenting subjugated races as inferior, eager scientists, intrepid explorers, shameless promoters and greedy businessmen – often one and the same person – found common interest in coercing or bribing ‘exotic’ natives to be put ...”

“... posterity most: the record of his life before 1939. His revelations about his middle-aged self and others in the studio penumbra were generally shrewd, unsurprising and circumspect. The first volume (1939-60), admirably edited by Kate Bucknell, was published in 1997. The second is imminent and the third is in hand. Five months after the first volume ...”

“... were several editors, each responsible for the decade of their angry youth. Instead, we have a self-satisfied older gent, whose portrait of contemporary protest is worryingly superficial. The anthology omits most protests of any significance over the past decade or so, both in the UK and elsewhere. The world’s most important social movement, according to ...”

“... to the excursus or the parenthetical remark. He admires the succession of short, narrowly-spaced, self-evident steps in a mathematical proof, and his own prose mimics this effect to a remarkable degree. Although the telescope figures as the instrument of wonders for Fisher, his own observations are more reminiscent of the microscope. Especially in the final ...”

“... of life without the boredom of its conveyance’; ‘the grin without the Cheshire cat’; his self-descriptions are unbeatable.) Sylvester notes how his reliance on photos left him disoriented when confronted with living models in the 1950s – a disengagement from traditional skills that would become institutionalised in the era of Warhol. The mastery of ...”

“... appearance of his palaces and princesses – but it comes to seem a permissible fault. And he is self-conscious. In his ‘Translator’s Preface’, McKane declares: ‘The translator is like a pane of glass through which one can glimpse the heart of the matter, not a mirror or reflection but a transparent film which should not hold up the eye.’ He falls ...”

“... his faith on the possibilities of a socially aware architecture and distrusted the maverick, self-regarding tendencies of architects with every bone in his body. Yet he was by no means unwilling to see promise when he met it, even in unlikely quarters. He admired architects working in a contemporary vernacular, such as the Norfolk practice, Tayler and ...”

“... policy varied according to the everchanging circumstances of the Jews, its limits were defined by self-interest.’ In other words, there may have been times when, either because of public pressure or out of a need to keep the Americans (who had Jewish voters to worry about) onside, it was necessary to appear to act, but the limits on what might be done were ...”

“... come true, writing is now a normal thing and the public stuff performed more as a duty than for self-satisfaction. The woman stood in front of me and I prepared my face to receive her compliments on my writing with appropriate humility. ‘I just want to tell you that I really love your hair,’ she said. I ...”

“... it’. No longer the Cold War prophet, Custine emerges as a gifted, alienated individual, whose self-absorption makes his account a faithful record of his own obsessions but a dubious authority on Russia. If we are still drawn La Russie en 1839, it is because it confirms our prejudices so ...”

“... to live as they think fit. In short, to act tolerantly one must employ practical wisdom, exercise self-control and sometimes show courage and generosity. Which then is to be preferred, toleration or its successor ideals? Glen Newey does not address the question directly, but his closely reasoned book gives us cause to believe that neutrality and sensitivity ...”

“... to the Lord’s anointed?’ Alter notes the piety of David’s words but also their political self-interest because now ‘he alone is the Lord’s anointed.’ One issue which such carefully ambiguous narrative raises is the extent to which the reader or hearer is encouraged to think of Yahweh as a fictional construct used first by the prophet to keep a ...”