“... either shameless or vain shall not deter him. Geoffrey Wolff might have made the same promise: his self-portrait as a show-off, know-all, flippant brat is courageous, but no more so than his presentation of himself, at the beginning of the book and the end, not just as a survivor – which under the circumstances would have been quite an achievement in itself ...”

“... done harm at the time, for she conned women in the same way that Samuel Smiles conned men when in Self-Help he persuaded them that any man could, say, build the Scott Monument or discover vaccination. In blustering across ravines, neither Grand nor Smiles seemed to see that as long as ravines were there many people would fall into them. Grand would certainly ...”

“... without clever philosophical or psychological digressions. Florey might have made some amusedly self-depreciatory remark about the use of the word ‘great’, but if he had done so he would have been – as he seldom was ...”

“... card games resembling modern French Tarot in one or more fairly obvious ways. But it is not self-evident that either card games, as such, or European card games, as such, make a particularly interesting category. The point I am making here is implicit in Dummett’s remarks at page 63, where he notes with some surprise (and perhaps irritation) that ...”

“... power, where no statute has yet intervened’. Quite apart from this extraordinary act of self-arrogation, it is difficult to imagine any group further out of touch with contemporary morality than the Law Lords. Yet the years since 1961 have seen hundreds of convictions for offences against this impudently invented law. On the whole, it has been ...”

“... and in direct taxation, a cutback in the role of the state, more individual responsibility and self-reliance – in short, as she liked to put it, a return to ‘Victorian values’. The intellectual origins of all this go back a long way: David Green starts with a brief conducted tour of Locke, Hume and Adam Smith. Of more immediate interest are the ...”

“... When Madonna was five years old, her mother died of cancer, and her father married again. Cue self-examination on the superstar’s part: ‘Like all young girls I was in love with my father, and I didn’t want to lose him. I lost my mother but then I was the mother; my father was mine.’ Andersen refers us – as he often must – to the film In Bed ...”

“... last decade; but he hasn’t closed his eyes and spat it out either. His prose and persona are as self-effacing as Fraser’s are exhibitionist. The result is a decent ‘chronological introduction to the works of Shakespeare in the context of their age’. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I don’t. Mostly, though, I don’t care, because, being an ...”

“... with colourful demotic but the syntax is stately, uncertain, pseudo-British. It is as if these self-confident slack-mouths suspect that what they are saying might get written down and used in evidence. Maybe this is why they talk to Mr X: they know – as we are not supposed to – that he is actually a hotshot columnist, that he is an associate of Arnold ...”

“... 1890s. Reed’s poems offer pleasures similar to those of the poems of Wilde and Symons – the self is posed as voyeur, consuming sights, colours, sensations, frissons, playing with the possibilities of alternative identities and with aspirations to transcendence. Red-Haired Android offers us aestheticism updated not so much to the Nineties as to the ...”

“... at the beginning, Sarah Good denied everything, Sarah Osborne accused Sarah Good. The self-owned witch Tituba has consequently become, in the ever-swelling literature about the horrors of Salem, the catalyst for the tragedy: hers was the original, circumstantial account which proved witchcraft was at work in the afflictions of the accusers. As the ...”

“... cold and hard as Sharp is held to have been do not destroy themselves in alcoholic depression and self-loathing. That kind of behaviour is surely evidence more of emotional turmoil. The world of Edwardian leftish journalism inhabited by Sharp was dominated by two opposed currents. A clutch of Liberal papers, headed by the Nation and the Westminster ...”

“... anti-revisers that they are merely instances of theatrical sophistication, the work of intrusive, self-indulgent actors. And there are certainly cases where that kind of explanation is more plausible than it is here. Conflicts of opinion naturally get sharper when the decisions that have to be made involve the substance of Othello, Lear or Hamlet. They call ...”

“... as to suggest (unofficially) that it might be illegal for Somalis to fire on UN troops, even in self-defence. Although it fell short of this absurdity, the UN did in fact conflate jus ad bellum with the jus in bello, and – as they did not do in the case of anti-colonial liberation struggles – made this a legal reality. In a little-noticed precedent, the ...”

“... The implication in Willinsky’s verdict is that future mutations of OED will be much less self-mystified than their deluded predecessors. The problem is, however, that works of such magnitude are only undertaken by those deluded to the point of fanaticism (like the Mormons and their gigantic genealogical database in Salt Lake City). The ...”