“... Eton means nothing in this context. Both men have been for most of their lives rich, confident and self-assured. Neither belongs to the aristocracy, though Mr Macmillan married into it. And what does ‘aristocracy’ really mean in a world of endless absorption and assimilation? All this chip-on-the-shoulder fussication about social class, exploited ...”

“... early twenties he developed a powerful technical apparatus; he liked to boast of being virtually self-taught in Greek, but Grafton shows that he learned much about textual criticism from Turnebus and Auratus and, later, much about the systematic reconstruction of archetypes and lost works from the great jurist Cujacius. At 24 he published valuable ...”

“... at levels which leave plant and workers idle. Yet this is indeed an equilibrium – there is no self-righting tendency, actual or thwarted, towards full capacity. This is the practical implication of the theory of effective demand, but there is also a theoretical implication. For what role is now left for interest rate? No longer the arbiter of supply and ...”

“... 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 ...”