“... of India. But it works exquisitely well for 1848 because there has never been a more garrulous or self-reflective revolution. Everywhere in Europe, the personal testimony produced in such prodigious quantities by the protagonists reveals a remarkable intensity of historical awareness. This was one important difference between 1848 and 1789: contemporaries of ...”

“... of scribbling women’ – had not received the highest literary accolades. Only unyielding male self-interest could explain why the impulse to reform that had hastened the Civil War was not allowed to reach fruition, and why women were forced back into their separate sphere. The passage of time and, especially, the appearance of biographies of the leading ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... For miles outside the village – and outside every village I passed through in Somaliland, the self-proclaimed but unrecognised state that comprises the northern part of Somalia – thousands of sheep and goats lay strewn in varying states of decay. The contents of their stomachs, it was easy to see, were mainly colourful shreds of plastic ingested in the ...”

“... climbers. Alternately puffed up and slapped down, his temperament developed into a mixture of self-doubt and ambivalence interlaced with short-lived bursts of enthusiasm and fits of petulance. Not naturally empathetic or a particularly good judge of character, he was not saved by friendships or by having any single outstanding ability. At Cambridge, where ...”

“... alone with itself as inwardness, and that therefore can take as its sole form and final aim the self-expression of the subjective life’. Hegel’s followers, epigones and incomprehenders (his prose does make it easy to be one of those) turned lyric into the mode in which poets represented the operations of consciousness and creativity. Spirit strutted its ...”

“... to be part of the EU, the commitments that must be shared for it to endure and those that risk its self-destruction. They must also decide how the EU will engage with an outside world defined by conflict, not least that generated by the legacies of European involvement in the Middle ...”

“... book ends with her spending the night in a ditch, where she’s visited by a vision of her former self, echoing an image of her mother from the beginning of the book, wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The extent of Wray’s foreshadowing – which touches most aspects of the novel’s plot – makes the ending feel like a conspiracy. Perhaps it’s paranoid to say ...”

“... into her. She will nearly bite my fingers to get at an eclair. And there are flashes of her old self still. We watched Four Weddings and a Funeral together recently, and she giggled when Rowan Atkinson called on ‘the father, the son and the holy goat’. (That line is funny.) Last Mothers’ Day, just as I was leaving for London, she called out ...”

“... the entire book. Much of the energy in d’Eramo’s story comes from the tension between her self-destructive impulses and her forceful will to live. But it’s intimately bound up with another impulse: ‘I was crushed by a sorrow and shame that paralysed my resolve. I had to shed my social class.’ (Her own earnestness on this score occasionally leads ...”

“... as it were through the spine or the outside of a book to what it contains, remembering the past self that read the book (or that bought the book with the intention of reading it one day) and re-experiencing the feeling of reading it for the first time. There’s a latent knowledge or an association of memories that gets released by that or by the book’s ...”

“... his (female) cousin Bichonnade in mid-leap over a flight of stone steps. Decades later, and self-referentially, Lartigue persuaded Richard Avedon to launch himself upwards, camera in hand, with a curling whip of flash cable snaking about in the air.The world he took part in and portrayed was one where Zola ran into Colette, where Nana met Gigi. And the ...”

“... stand beside a single red square, bringing ‘a strange counterbalance of human silliness and self-importance’, as she put it, to the austerity of the image. Finally, the forms become stranger. Limbs shrink, bodies stretch, faces become fronded or cubist, less comical, more expressive. One critic called them ‘modern cave paintings’, which Franciszka ...”

“... are furious remarks by the likes of Randolph Churchill to the effect that Eden was ‘a hysterical self-serving prima donna’. Thorpe is so squeamish that even when he tells us that Eden’s son, Nicholas, died of Aids, he doesn’t explicitly state that he was gay. Yet, annoyingly, his opinions on all manner of other matters and politicians, right down to ...”

“... comprehensiveness. They kept children out of the state sector and deprived it of a powerful and self-confident vested interest: the parents of those who go to public schools. Old Labour never had the courage to touch the independent schools even when it might have done so. Now it couldn’t be done anyway since human rights legislation and EU law probably ...”