“... revelatory experience. In his letters to Thornycroft he can be felt as virtually discovering a new self. Thornycroft (like Nellie) appears to have taken the situation in his stride, maintaining an eager pleasure in Gosse’s company, holidaying with him and making him his best man. The episode – if it can be called that – prompts a rummage. A letter of ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the ranks at the back were increasingly happy and those at the front, pace Hirsch and other self-described but resentful realists, were not very visibly disaffected. (In the Sixties, in some research that was published with the Institute, W.G. Runciman had found that the English had always made very narrow social and economic comparisons.) Young did not ...”

“... reflexes from the British medical establishment. Patents also drove it to bizarre extremes of self-defeating behaviour. Chain, whose father was a German industrialist, urged that patents be taken out on the penicillin process, not least because if British firms failed to do so they would find themselves paying royalties to others. Edward Mellanby, the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... was one bloke here for a couple of days who had come specifically to give us a workshop on self-control. Well he just couldn’t take it – he bashed into this cauldron of boiling water, almost spilling it over one of the women, and then he just stormed off.’ There does, however, seem still to be a real difficulty, compounded by the fact that the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... better adapted to the pressing social needs of the times. Wolfe makes a great deal of (ultimately self-cancelling) fun of modern architecture’s alleged origins in Marxist ‘worker’s housing’ in Mittel-Europa, but shows no sense of how good, how important, that must have looked at the time. There is no mention of the architecture of the Tennessee Valley ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... fantasy, the fetishism, the group-sex, the masturbation (mutual and solo – or sola), the self-mutilation, the incessant oozings and ejaculations and enemas and even, occasionally, some relatively straightforward coitus – are likely to have a distinct feeling of ‘Here we go again’ when on the first page of the first section of The White Hotel ...”

“... not the substance. If an entire intake of ordinands is shrilly homosexual, if a famous Dean is a self-publicising opportunist, the revelation is made to seem good for a giggle. The occasional flash of ‘serious’ comment seems out of place: ‘This new Mass ... made a cult of ugliness and banality. Its appalling phrases emphasised nothing but the confusion ...”

“... strong that it attracts ‘right-wing’ members – the naturally authoritative, antiprogressive, self-seeking and smug, the sort who would join the Tories if they lived in ‘a safe Conservative seat’. But Darlington is not like that at all. The Labour Movement is still paternal, the Big Daddy of the town, usually (but not always) in command of the Borough ...”

“... across as quite strikingly unpleasant characters: ruthless, unstable, megalomaniac, dishonest, self-important, bombastic, arrogant, vindictive, scurrilous, vain and hyperbolic. Several of them were also mad. Others were content simply to drive their editors mad. Our first baron is James Gordon Bennett Sr (1785-1872), the man who raised the American press ...”

“... us of one of the permanent psychological wounds left by the loss of the language: a habit of self-castigation which can easily become shame, a sense of inferiority which can easily become submission. It was out of shame and submission that the language revival grew, defending its newly acquired vigour in an exclusive, often bitter spirit, always ...”