“... distinctly unreal ... His nose was large and prominent. His eyes ... added to the appearance of self-parody. With a slightly pathetic expression on his face ... he seemed a caricature of the man he once was. What puzzles Taylor is that so many women were willing to ‘leap into his bed’. Walter Duranty was a complex man, as the author clearly shows. What ...”

“... selection produce selfish genes that prescribe unselfishness? The examples of the workers’ self-denying behaviour, performed for the benefit of the colony, are mind-boggling: desert ants, which store the honeydew they collect in their crops, and which are specialised to serve as food storage receptacles (the repletes); foraging workers, in whom the ...”

“... which incorporated some new elements, including a softer international line and the idea of ‘self-financing’ for business enterprises. Otherwise, the ‘New Edition’ – still, as of now, the official Party programme – is as rigidly correct as the slow-motion goosestep of the KGB guards on their way to and from guard duty at Lenin’s tomb in Red ...”

“... replaced the British aristocracy as the holders of power, wealth and status. Is it a plutocracy of self-made men, as Cannadine frequently suggests, or is it the professional middle classes? The first seem to predominate up to about 1925, but since then a case can be made that the real heirs are the second, the yuppies of our time. In 1884 Gladstone was afraid ...”

“... Nor was Kennedy’s handling of the crisis initially as sure-footed and commanding as the self-serving and misleading account by his brother Robert suggests. Kennedy’s dramatic televised announcement of the discovery of Soviet missiles in Cuba was ‘designed to divert attention from his private belief (and that of Defence Secretary Robert ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to an audience. Such writing is conspicuous for its puritan theatricality – the term is not self-contradictory – for it carries always the preacher’s sense of speaking to and through a deeply attentive audience. Both critic and preacher demand complete attentive assent, an act of faith. Once that assent is given, the performance can begin, but it ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... other Iraqis in the Republican Guard were free to suppress the Shia revolt in Basra. An engaging self-portrait emerges from Simpson’s story. He comes across as a man big enough to acknowledge his mistakes; with unusual tastes in people (he ends a pretty damning indictment of a ‘brutal’ censor called Mme Awatif with the touching remark, ‘I regarded ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... for instance, that: ‘What strikes the casual [sic] reader most about this passage is Dante’s self-conscious choice of the French term, alluminar (his version of enluminer), rather than the standard Italian word miniare (from minio, red oxide of lead).’ I learned something new on virtually every page. At the same time Gage’s interpretations of the ...”

“... yet independent of it; she knew Virginia Woolf but condescended to what she regarded as the over-self-conscious Mrs Dalloway, and indeed one suspects that she thought herself, though without vanity, which was not one of her vices, as simply a better writer than Woolf. Her father was a housemaster at Harrow, and her education – highly privileged, as we may ...”

“... fact that, as Southern has again said, Europe in the 11th century experienced ‘that moment of self-generating growth for which economists now look so anxiously in underdeveloped countries’. It could be more significant than is suggested by the place, rather late in his book, that Bartlett allots it, that the expansionary parts of Europe had almost ...”

“... to the way his life will be taken from him; misses too, in the absorption of his romance and his self-pity, what it means to love someone so much you won’t give them up. Ryder does what she can with all this, she is bright and quick and engaging, but in the end there are just two stories here, one in her manner and another in the plot, or one for two hours ...”