“... Union, and thus illuminates the cruel dilemmas of many hundreds of thousands of talented and self-aware people, trapped in the unhappy country from which he, fortunately, managed to escape. His scientific career was outstanding, but not unconventional, even by Western standards. The clever Jewish boy, precociously brilliant at mathematics, is a familiar ...”

“... the ‘Times’ is a remarkably bland book, less critical and more comforting to the old thing’s self-esteem than the official history (edited by Stanley Morrison). Too briefly treated is the story of the paper’s virile early days, when the Controller used to send a retired Irish officer round to the homes of gentlemen with erring wives with the threat ...”

“... of the novels at various stages in their writing. Mr Williams also has a more general, and oddly self-defeating, argument. He proposes as evidence of this collaboration the badness of the result: for example, the ‘tedium’ of Daniel Deronda reflects Lewes’s influence. It hardly needs to be pointed out that this is a very treacherous way of claiming ...”

“... for Franco; that he had fought in the Second World War. Alexander generously tolerates these self-improvements by describing Campbell as a ‘great myth-maker’. But he wasn’t that. His yarns don’t add up to a myth: he was simply a great liar. It’s all part of the Byronic role: but let’s not make even a poet’s lies virtuous by calling them ...”

“... in [Auden’s] own consciousness’. It expressed ‘an essential uncertainty of purpose and of self’, such that Auden’s ‘assured personal manner’ covered something very different. Taking up Empson’s account of the work, Leavis alluded to Empson’s own poems and their superiority, in mastery of their emotions, to Auden’s. ‘The ...”

“... death of the first child, born prematurely when its mother fell downstairs, produced an orgy of self-pity in Loti’s journals. ‘This little model of myself who would have had my thoughts, my problems, my agonies, and who was already turning to dust, the dust of eternity ...’ Not much thought there for the unfortunate mother, who was later to be ...”

“... nature of thought and he was evidently possessed by a sentiment of uncompromising integrity and self-respect, a Tolstoyan pride in his autonomy and independence, and in a certain moral isolation. He happened to be of a homosexual disposition and he loved a few men, sometimes happily, sometimes not. He was prosecuted for a homosexual offence, and received a ...”

“... regrettably hacked-back article in the Observer in 1996. Curtis’s digging was news even by the self-referential standards of the gated media village. In 1990, Kathy Kadane, an American agency journalist, made her name when she revealed that in 1965 CIA officers had passed death sentences on five thousand members of the Indonesian Communist Party, the ...”

“... over-sexed harridan. Not surprisingly, he much admires Ronald Reagan, who restored ‘the will and self-confidence of the American people’ and launched ‘decisive and masterful’ initiatives like the Star Wars anti-missile defence programme that was supposed to surround the country with the equivalent of a bullet-proof vest. True, his Administration ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... him in a remark about Loyalist ‘operators’. In The Edge of the Union, Steve Bruce, the self-styled ‘Prods are me’ spokesman of academe, observes that ‘paramilitaries use the term “operators” to distinguish those members who have been or are prepared to be personally involved in illegal violence from the “backroom boys”, “armchair ...”

“... his other book, Adventures of a Younger Son, not wholly fiction, but notorious for its fantasy and self-aggrandisement. Had Trelawny been nothing but a braggart, his lies would diminish him; ironically, because his real life was to become, for a while, so genuinely romantic and melodramatic, his fabrications seem to add yet more brio to the larger-than-life ...”

“... undeniably middle-class, and this unhappy accident of birth occasionally induced in him bouts of self-contempt. That this portrait of him should be so enormously detailed testifies to the author’s confidence that a reasonably large readership will be fascinated by the whims, fantasies and extravagances which spread like Alpine plants over the rock-like ...”