“... Other Rooms (1948), The Grass Harp (1951) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958). Even at 21, he took self-conscious care of his sentences. ‘In the falling quiet,’ he could write, ‘there was no earth or sky, only snow lifting in the wind, frosting the window glass, chilling the rooms, deadening and hushing the city.’ At 22, in a story called ‘The ...”

“... Value. Best buy. Making the best of it. Look on the bright side. Spin doctors, post-literate and self-deceiving, had no use for subtlety. Best Value. They hammered the tag into their inelegant, over-designed freebies. These glossy publications, political correctness in all its strident banality, existed to sell the lie. Best Value. Government-sponsored ...”

“... though he always claimed Darwin as a major influence), Mill, Comte, Marcus Aurelius. A pattern of self-education, ravenous and stringent, had begun. In London for five years from 1862, Hardy attended French classes at King’s College, and went daily for a time to the National Gallery to study a selected painter or painting. His Literary Notebooks, which have ...”

“... the other, there were the forces of indigenous rule, the so-called ‘provisional institutions of self-government’, which Unmik was supposed to invigilate, but which hungered increasingly for real power: the Kosovo government, which will outlive the UN mission, consists of a president, an elected assembly – 120 seats – and an executive with a prime ...”

“... English poetry might very well start’. Opinion about his relation to his age has always been self-divided. He said he had no relation to it. Edmund Wilson wrote in 1938 that the poems ‘went on vibrating for decades’, despite their lethal pastoral of condemned men and suicides, soldiers and doomed lovers, their stopped clock of velleities and arrested ...”

“... still a museum to his memory. Graves and Riding continued to enact a tormenting reel of emotional self-destruction until their final separation in 1939. She introduced further men into the group, stopped sleeping with Graves, and then took up, permanently, with a man called Schuyler Jackson. By the late 1930s Graves had begun a relationship, which lasted ...”

“... in classics. If we are going to have endless retranslations of the same old texts – which is not self-evidently a good thing – we might hope that at least some of them would be done by classicists who are younger, or less white, or less male.Of course, it is quite easy for anyone, from any social background or identity, to replicate the same tired old ...”

“... unsolved. What did he have that all the others didn’t? What was his secret?Part of the answer is self-fulfilling. These books ask why people are still writing about a man who left public office more than forty years ago and has been burnishing his legend ever since, while making a lot of money on the side. Surely there must be more to his celebrity than ...”

“... what the rest of us daily endure. The disparity between her professed fearlessness and her actual self-protective closetedness strikes a questioning footnote that is the one blot on her otherwise brilliant career.’I have to say I could never figure her out on this touchy subject – though we did talk about it. Her usual line (indignant and aggrieved) was ...”

“... masque Alfred by Thomas Arne and James Thomson. The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders for the title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the ...”

“... then social reform was frustrated by an imperial overlord, it could morph into a mass movement for self-determination or even sovereign independence – which could in turn precipitate full-scale war, as Great Power armies intervened with overwhelming strength and firepower. Another cliché, still common on the left, is that Marx and Engels dismissed 1848 in ...”

“... in a way that invalidates her literary aspirations. At the chapter’s end the little kick of self-reference would land more effectively – unless you think it’s coincidental that Desai’s first novel was called Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. (Her second, The Inheritance of Loss, won the Booker Prize in 2006.) The college is closed over the winter ...”

“... turn sardonic. He is listening to old Dedalus, in the cab taking them to the funeral (87): Noisy self-willed man. Full of his son. He is right. Something to hand on. If little Rudy had lived. See him grow up. Hear his voice in the house. Walking beside Molly in an Eton suit. My son. Me in his eyes. Strange feeling it would be. From me. Just a chance. Must ...”

“... diagnosis. Within the individual there were two contrary bents, one towards a sturdy spiritual ‘self-employment’ in a life of adventure, the other towards a menial ‘partnership’ for the reception of benefits – and such were the springs of the two types of government, which could not be reconciled. All of Oakeshott’s imposing erudition ends in the ...”

“... inquests in which the corpse pretends to be the coroner’, but whatever self-justifications he might have entered as evidence, the reading of his file is hampered by his absence. It is an unwritten rule of MI5 that Personal Files (PFs) are only released after their subjects have died. Another unwritten rule, among so many, is that it ...”