“... but prone to relapses, still somewhat delusional when sober and often in the grip of some New Age self-help regimen. It opens with Louanne’s death and Antrim’s feelings of relief, which soon give way to guilt and a sense of being haunted as he shops for an expensive bed and finds that no mattress will quite do: his mother’s ghost won’t let him ...”

“... problem in Hungary lies in the resurgence of the extreme right, and specifically of Jobbik, the self-declared ‘radically patriotic Christian party’ that gained just over one-fifth of the votes in this year’s elections, making it the third largest party. But while there is no doubting that Jobbik’s deputies and leaders are given to making ...”

“... beneath two guys who have crossed their guitars together, two thunderfoxes in the throes of self-love and combat, that powerful form of intimacy only achieved onstage in front of other people, known as male bonding.’It seems that, under the proto-slacker sarcasm, she was dead serious. She was obsessed at the time, she writes, with the way men used ...”

“... successful it was the more it resembled a Tammany party: rather lazy, a little corrupt and very self-satisfied. Its best people continued to go to Westminster, even after the Scottish Parliament was set up in 1999; the early death of Donald Dewar, who went in the other direction, robbed the Scottish party of one of its few heavyweights. Over the last decade ...”

“... the politics out – the usual charge against social history – but the potted histories of, say, self-sufficiency, from the Diggers to the plotlands of Essex, are no more or less prominent than her discussions of Royal Horticultural Society exams or of the reason some tulips have stripes (a virus borne by aphids not discovered until the 1920s). A house no ...”

“... exculpating rationale for torture before the fact. Selfless patriotism may be part of it. Sadistic self-indulgence may also be part of it. Who can say in what proportions they were mixed? A principle such as an unconditional ban on torture is tested precisely by its observance in a fear-engendering crisis. If your belief in the principle gradually ...”

“... seemed a fragile conceit, even a gimmick, until with the passing of time it moved from metaphor to self-evident truth, and one that applies at least as much to London as New York. In Did You Ever Have a Family the incomers (income being very much the point) can slip in and out of Wells as they like, while the inhabitants have very limited choices. There is a ...”

“... just a job at a wallpaper factory. Arthur is going broke for writing a book about deception, self-deception and persecution, while professional Marxists brand him a schnorrer and advise him to return to Soviet Czechoslovakia. The absurdities of Theresienstadt and the museum recur in Hampstead, not quite as tragedy, but not quite as farce either. It was ...”

“... permanently aggrieved sense of having to operate in a hostile institutional environment became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The British civil service may have many failings, but if you want to deliver lasting change it is the only instrument that can do it for you. Blair treated the administrative machinery of the UK state as though he really were in ...”

“... of the report by the Major government – which took seven days to digest the report and prepare self-serving press briefings, while Robin Cook, the shadow foreign secretary, was given three hours – made it possible for the government to weather the storm. No one resigned, despite Scott’s explicit finding – explicit, but buried in four volumes and 1800 ...”

“... never more bombastic than in reports of the defeat at Stalingrad – on the need for self-sacrifice to keep Germany from going under. Stargardt claims that his book ‘offers a very different understanding of the effects that wartime defeats and crises had on German society’ from that offered by previous historians. The approach he adopts ...”

“... was its civilisational birthright and heritage – a position of pre-eminence in world affairs. Self-belief of this sort has always been a feature of Chinese thinking. But during Mao’s early years in power, the notion that China could make progress only by adopting imported ideas was still a relatively new and radical concept. As recently as the late 18th ...”

“... Compton-Burnett, Stevie Smith, Charlotte Mew and Penelope Fitzgerald. All unflinching, elliptical, self-disguising. King quotes well from a terrific essay in which Bainbridge describes the surprise she got when she attended her brother’s funeral. She hadn’t realised he had been a coroner. So: they did, after all, have something in common. They both had ...”

“... house, in the rose-garden, their younger daughter, seven-year-old Perdita, strange, mysterious and self-absorbed as usual, was beheading a litter of puppies with unexpectedly muscular and adult twists of her slender arms. Her cap of golden hair shone like burnished auburn on her head.’ Bradbury does capture something. Occasional whiffs of Walter ...”

“... taken over from locomotives as Platonov’s favourite metaphor. The upbeat mood and recovering self-confidence remains dominant in his wartime letters, even in the face of his son’s death in Ufa in January 1943. Platonov had been rehabilitated as a writer, at least for the time being, publishing sketches of army life and planning larger-scale work when ...”