“... 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 ...”

“... wrote his appreciation, W.F. Ridgeway, Professor of Archaeology at Cambridge, allowed himself the self-indulgence of hind-sight in an address to the Conference of the Classical Association: ‘for the last two generations British men of science ... aimed chiefly at being the first to introduce into this country the last thing said in Germany, even though that ...”

“... it has induced a 17th century turn of phrase – or indeed, of mind. And the entire book is self-consciously in the form of a series of meditations of a doctor-philosopher, a sort of Religio Medici for our times. He condenses images into a dense, suggestive mass; he adores infinity. And then one stumbles over a piece of nonsense. ‘What does a father ...”

“... early as 1868. Admittedly the demonstration was in a remote and inaccessible learned journal, but self-respecting scholars should have known about it. Most did not – or if they did, they found its arguments too painful or inconvenient. Consequently the forged collection continues to be quoted as authentic down to our own day, even after Beales’s own ...”

“... years or more, 70 per cent were having affairs. There is a lot of deception around; some of it self-deception. Eighty-two per cent of women believed that their husbands were faithful: but earlier Hite research showed that 72 per cent of men who had been married for over two years were seeing other women. These statistics do seem to contradict one’s ...”

“... a solution, and no one else has got one. The Right has retreated into paper-profits, the Left into self-administration, and down the middle has come, not the Alliance nor the SDP nor Kiwi-fruit sorbets for all, but tower-blocks with the lifts turned off to save money and ‘creative design’ jobs in their turn superannuated by computer technology. Everyone ...”

“... his work. Her broodings on Dante are of the same order. Her many volumes of memoirs are shallow, self-centred, capricious and repetitive. Ocampo’s true vocation, and no doubt one at which she would have excelled, was the stage. Her parents frustrated her acting career, and Victoria the writer grew up a poor substitute. It does not necessarily follow that ...”

“... Should one try to sympathise with this frenetic, unstoppable, ambitious, arrogant, élitist, un-self-conscious, radical, enthusiastic, honourable, priggish, yet undeniably engaging young man, or object to him? If you identify with him, accept him as a likeable and basically commendable person, which is the natural temptation in a book as agreeably written ...”

“... into the document-shredder of the University of Hull. The biographer who will need to salvage this self-torpedoed section of the life is none other than Andrew Motion. The only small addition I can offer the impeccable Register is over the entry for Compton Mackenzie. The compilers rightly list a large manuscript holding by the Humanities Research Centre at ...”

“... the Thirties, when he finally sealed off his servile kingdom from the West. Apart from a little self-taught German, he spoke no foreign languages. He made only four trips to Europe during his life. And he never wore a suit or necktie in public, but appeared in Asiatic military garb. A second source of insecurity, which increased as his career ...”

“... law whilst defending the national interest (the nature of which is in any case far from being self-evident) is again in doubt. It has all happened with great suddenness. Last year, Reagan’s mere presence before television cameras was eagerly sought by colleagues running for re-election to the House and Senate. In the weeks prior to the polls, he ...”

“... came to be seen as embodied in order to possess that particularity. As Bynum puts it, ‘what self is (including what body is) will be packed into soul; body will be the expression of that soul in matter.’ This principle departs radically from early Christian dualist lamentations (tinged with Gnosticism as well as classical disgust for the flesh) over ...”

“... paid to the province of East Prussia, which soon became a scandal. Indirectly, the corruption and self-interest helped the Nazis: Hitler was the revenge of the little man on a Prussian élite that had wooed the peasantry and craftsmen for forty years with anti-semitism, antiliberalism and anti-socialism, but now found itself undone by an even more effective ...”

“... can provide an implicit but ironically continuous contrast between the ‘diverse and undulant’ self-discoveries of his individuality and the impersonal needs and importunities of the flesh. There was something comic about five Booker judges discussing the book’s felicities, and its possible moments of failure, without ever really getting around to what ...”