“... colophon testify to a fierce will to survive (perhaps also to the new style at Harmondsworth). Self-evidently, at least one rebirth has been achieved – although I would not bet on eternal renewal. As with its predecessor, the principle on which Firebird’s assembly is made seems to be that of multiple cross-section of work in progress. The editor has ...”

“... sincerely wants to be rich. A Spanish treasure ship, traced to the correct Caribbean reef after a self-educating search through the libraries of two continents, gives him his desire, and on the way, the women – still somewhat older than the hero – that seem appropriate to his education. In the second half of the book Mark, who seems to have learnt less ...”

“... wanted to buy, or for having clung too long to closed shops and excessive manning levels. This self-lacerating mood contributes to Mrs Thatcher’s other discovery, which is that in hard times the Trade Union movement knuckles under. No wonder that a poll the other day disclosed that public anxiety about militancy or radicalism in union leaderships was ...”

“... found themselves outside the state church. Calvinism could survive within congregations of the self-selected godly, whether Presbyterian, Independent, Baptist or Muggletonian. But it had never been popular with the ‘loose multitude’, for whom the Church of England still had to cater, and after the Interregnum it lost much of its appeal for the ...”

“... of some of his less endearing characteristics. He even says, In an illuminating page or two of self-analysis (it’s supposed to be about someone called Michael, but his brother is so sure it’s about himself that he changes that name to Patrick): ‘Sometimes he deliberately set out to hate people, and though hating by all the rules of warfare seemed the ...”

“... encrusted the pure teaching of the Veda over the centuries, and to produce well-educated Indians, self-confident, proud of their own culture, and with no need or desire to ape the British. Its development, its internal fissures, and its relations with the Congress movement, are an important thread in the book. As an Arya Samajist, Babuji discouraged those of ...”

“... domestic staff. The sense of identity never falters. Nor does the sense of comedy, the enjoyable self-mockery that comes with the realisation that African reality often pairs absurdly with European habits. ‘There are two huge puff adders on the boundary – such a worry because of the dogs ... Porcupines are eating my spuds.’ Or, on the outbreak of ...”

“... effect’ is of ‘conversation’. And Woodward writes: ‘In The Pisan Cantos the poet’s own self, having been largely absorbed into mask, pastiche and translation in earlier Cantos, for the first time appears on stage.’ All this is true and not true, and the sense in which it is not true is important. Pound and his circumstances in the detention camp ...”

“... how much more so of Jonson’s wonderfully judged, poised and (as Leavis used to say) even self-consciously ‘central’ poem, ‘Tonight, grave sir, both my poor house and I ...’; and of Herrick’s ‘A sweet disorder in the dress ...’ and ‘Whenas in silks my Julia goes ...’, and of Marvell’s ‘Ye living lamps, by whose dear light’, and ...”

“... essence’ would probably be little affected if the vote were restricted to those with a ‘self-conscious interest’ in the fortunes of the nation: people of position, education, wealth or power. The principle of charity should replace the welfare state. The law should strictly control morality, for the family and its natural authority must be the ...”

“... 1914, Tuchman is forced to invent one of her own. The result is a series of eight essays, self-contained, entertaining in themselves, with occasional patches of superb writing, but feebly connected by concepts taken from the period itself: ‘the unconscious boredom of peace’, the desire for combat, and the existence of surplus energies seeking ...”

“... does not blot out the sun completely you have a sky-full that an English Duke could not buy him-self. I could shoot a record percentage up here with a crut of an English antique 12 bore shotgun let alone the Griffin and Howe Springfield I had them send me back in Key West 1931. And I would not need the telescopic sight as we all have that here anyway. Did ...”

“... that sprawling agglomeration of the Ottoman Empire, but then, in a lamentable failure of will and self-inflicted loss of control, capitulated in the face of the disruptive influence of nationalism, first in the aftermath of the First World War and, more spectacularly, at Suez and in the Algerian War. At times, the sarcasm overreaches itself, lashing out, a ...”

“... reason can only be an exercise in manipulative verbal fetishism or in more or less inadvertent self-deception. This is not a topic on which any modern Anglo-Saxon moral philosopher has had anything of much weight to say, although it is clearly the most important single question in moral philosophy. Not only does moral philosophy at present lack an ...”

“... immediately sized him up in 1940 as ‘one of the most objectionable people I had ever met: noisy, self-assertive, whining, and frankly unpleasant’. In 1956, when Colville formed a lunch club with John Junor of the Sunday Express, one of the rules was that Randolph Churchill should under no circumstances be admitted. Perhaps Randolph improved with age. I ...”