“... of the Czech nation-state, thereby denying the right of the Bohemian or ‘Sudeten’ Germans to self-determination. At the same time, he applied ethnic and linguistic criteria to sever the Slovak lands from their historic link to the Hungarian crown. Subsequently, he allayed concerns about the fate of the Sudeten German ‘minority’ by promising to apply ...”

“... accelerated clock – Bates still had his mid-morning slot. One day he announced, with a little self-congratulatory tremor in his voice, that he was going to play some of the ‘indie’ music he’d been hearing about. One of the records he had selected was, he said, by a band from Manchester called the Stone Roses. It was called ‘Fool’s Gold’, and ...”

“... it. A deliberate attempt to break with accepted standards, it seemed to Minton faddish, corrupt, self-indulgent and hollow. ‘You might as well call it “Eden Come Home,” ’ he mocked – Eden, then Prime Minister, had abandoned England and the Suez crisis in order to recuperate from illness in Jamaica. (Denny later used this title for another ...”

“... and manuscript, he gives precision and a new focus to Christopher Hill’s rebuttal of Milton’s self-representation as a lonely prophet. Although courtly ideology and patronage dominated cultural production over much of the 17th century, they proved unable, Norbrook shows, to deflect or contain the enemies of kings. Rome had had other poets besides ...”

“... it may be surprising to find that Ayer habitually thought of himself as an ‘outsider’ and ‘self-made’, exaggerating the poverty of his family, looking at the world, as his widow, Dee Wells, puts it, with ‘big desiring eyes’, and, despite a career of equal brilliance as philosopher and hedonist, often a little anxious about where he stood on the ...”

“... a numerical key. For example, having chosen the five words THAT SWEET BONDAGE FREEDOM’S SELF, an agent would assign a number to each letter according to its alphabetical position and its place within the sentence. Thus, A in THAT gets I written under it, A in BONDAGE 2, B in BONDAGE 3, D in BONDAGE 4, D in FREEDOM 5, the first E in SWEET 6 and the ...”

“... one is ever simply himself but is always compounded of other people.’ For Beddoes the self was a graveyard, and his own was cluttered with the bodies of Keats and Shelley, Marlowe and Webster. Writing tragic drama legitimised his desire to resurrect the dead and dissect them. So it is not the tone of weary resignation in his suicide note which ...”

“... ones. Yet little more than a century ago, this literature was unknown. In 1872, George Smith, a self-taught scholar, found an extract from it on a clay tablet newly arrived in the British Museum. What he saw there made him exclaim that he was the first man to read these words for two thousand years. Then he started rushing around the room, removing his ...”

“... own certain death. If their party had only moved a little faster, Gillespie reflects, this supreme self-sacrifice would not have been necessary. The chaotic, almost leisurely violence of this scene, with events unfolding while riverside traders carry on selling hard-boiled eggs, is frighteningly well rendered. The story cuts back to Gillespie’s arrival in ...”

“... with progress, given to clever formalisms, inching towards the truth in many ways at once: Nash, a self-proclaimed conqueror, iconoclast and revolutionary who wrestled with ultra-difficult problems in the depths. Erdös all speed, lightness, constant movement: Nash heaviness, depth and endurance – carrying the same problem around with him in his head, for ...”

“... much?’ The episode also reveals what had become a settled feature of the Soviet economy – the self-sufficiency of most plants. The sheer difficulty of acquiring anything meant that the workers expected, and were encouraged to expect, that the plant – which was in the Plan – would supply the commodities and necessities of life for its workers, who were ...”

“... one of the joint heads of the Treasury ... He might have appeared, without make-up, as “Self-Love” or “Complacency” in a morality play like Everyman, though his performance might have been thought a little exaggerated.’ If he was a publisher with a passion for masterly editorial work and a high degree of social eligibility, that did not let ...”

“... material is brought before the prince in a suitably digested form.’ These views were of course self-serving and not universally accepted. They were expressed, as Professor Elliott says, ‘in a political climate which was increasingly hostile to the existence of a royal favourite’. Above all, this hostility could sometimes extend to their royal masters ...”

“... upon black and inconceivable extinction ... or as seeking uncertain reunion with the clan of the self-destroyed and the fratricidal dead.’ On the other hand – or rather, on the next page – she anticipates Socrates and expects a clearer vision of the truth once she is housed in the underworld. Again, the seductions of language lead to overblown ...”

“... private disorders, uncertainties and tumults are to remain private – what he makes public is a self ordered and harmonious, and therefore in no bullying sense exemplary. Tomlinson the poet is what Tomlinson the man manages to be at those moments when he is most in control of himself and his circumstances. How far this is from the agonising into print of a ...”