“... was not a hypocrite in any conventional sense, in that his behaviour was neither primarily self-serving nor inconsistent. It was North’s sincerity that enabled him to subvert the institutions for which he worked, and turn them against their own principles. ‘His main moral fault was not that he failed to be true to himself,’ Thompson ...”

“... to scorn the efforts of anyone who just dabbles, particularly if the dabbling looks like academic self-promotion. Significantly, those who have made a real difference to Ruskin studies over the past 20 years have not come from within the British university system. The courageous work of Helen Gill Viljoen, first of those who dared to challenge the magisterial ...”

“... noses (we can decipher his will to manipulation without such help), but to lend him the gift of self-commentary. At one point he tries on a striped waistcoat worn in a film of The Fall of the House of Usher. ‘ “I like,” he said obscurely, “I like – you know – to slip in and out of me ... Me and not-me.” ’ But this is not quite ...”

“... occupied by them for a century and a half; it survived thereafter only by being incorporated as a self-governing unit into the Habsburg Empire, benefiting from Habsburg military protection but successfully resisting administrative rationalisation. As anomalous exemplars of what might be called ‘state-unbuilding’, Poland and Hungary have been conveniently ...”

“... of Beaconsfield, and confidant of the Queen. In poem after poem Byron had revealed the histrionic self-doubt and sense of evil which had goaded him from one extravagant action to another; he had then moved on to the wonderfully truth-revealing irresponsibility and mischief of Don Juan. The result? A European-wide reputation, and one great poem, certainly: but ...”

“... any rate. Yet his conclusion is caustic: In the poetic tradition now dominant the authoritative self, discoursing in a world of banal, empirically derived objects and relations, depends on its employment of metaphor and simile for poetic vitality ... Poets are now praised above all else as inventors of figures – as rhetoricians, in fact – with a ...”

“... Lay aside for a moment your self-esteem and imagine that you are Jeffrey Archer. You are now a model citizen of the Post-Modern state of hyper-reality, a figure in whom actuality and invention, public fact and private fantasy, the business of government and the spinning of yarns have become utterly indistinguishable ...”

“... finding somewhere on the South Island a bit like ‘the Lake District’. The man who catches her, Robert Lemoine, an American billionaire and former CEO of a drone manufacturer, shuttles between disguises of his own: doomsday prepper, wannabe media baron, and, on occasion, an imaginary commanding officer at the CIA’s Special Operations Group called Lt Col ...”

“... but given the social conditions I didn’t think I could.’ There is also much pride and lack of self-pity. ‘We haven’t suffered enough,’ one says. ‘We’ve been too close to the USSR. Now we have to learn the hard way.’ This, unfortunately, isn’t going to be a problem. To the north, the Soviet Union displays froideur and has enough troubles of ...”

“... here – as are the movies and documentaries, with Albert Finney following Richard Burton and Robert Hardy as a screen Churchill. As for approval ratings, in an admittedly contrived phone-poll BBC2 viewers last November voted him the greatest Briton of all time. Most Churchill biographies have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at 1.5 kilos and a ...”

“... outlast the Obama presidency, and if it does the largest single reason will be Obama’s choice of Robert Gates as secretary of defence. Gates worked under William Casey, the director of the CIA at the time of the Iran-Contra scandal. His nomination by Ronald Reagan to head the CIA was thwarted by suspicions of his complicity in covert operations in ...”

“... faulty passages, but I know of no poet in any language who has written so much that is good,’ Robert Southey wrote (the declaration is emblazoned on the dust-jacket of Juliet Barker’s new Life). Yet any sense of this – of the subtle, elementary qualities of Wordsworth’s verse – is rarely apparent to those who study him, and rarely apparent in the ...”

“... it, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. With tragic and (in literary history) unparalleled self-delusion, he thought Sordello would be a popular success, and he was devastated by the farmyard chorus that greeted its appearance. Just as the critics accused him of wilful disregard for his readers, so he accused them of wilful laziness and ill-will. ‘My ...”

“... off Australia’s west coast on 3 October 1952 also dramatises the yearning and anxiety in British self-consciousness after the war. Soon after the test, the Daily Graphic apostrophised William Penney, the project’s leader: ‘Britain and the Commonwealth owe a debt – almost impossible to repay – to you ... the fact that you and your team have made it ...”

“... and not one made by Charles Higham, whose moral fervour in telling this wretched story twangs with self-righteousness. There’s talk of ‘moral cesspools’ and ‘man-hungry, tweedy heiresses’ – it’s a world where God and Charles Higham sit in judgment and everybody gets their just deserts. You might think that a man whose lovers include Katharine ...”