“... Twickenham, 1954 The New Zealanders handled the countdown with more aggression and a lot more self-importance. The selector, John Hart, on their arrival in the changing room: ‘It’s going to be a long wait, boys. Time to concentrate.’ Then the coach Brian Lochore, voice breaking with emotion: ‘You’re a good team but you’re not yet a great ...”

“... job helped you not only to learn practical skills such as arb, but also to witness the exercise of self-discipline. Traders could assess whether a clerk or runner who wanted to start trading was the kind of person it might be worth backing financially. Chicago’s tightly-knit neighbourhoods seem to have helped, by providing recruits who would already be known ...”

“... to publish it as soon as possible: Tony Blair’s topicality is on the wane. The Ghost is self-consciously concerned with the logic of publicity and sales, the pressure to get the former prime minister’s memoirs out there as soon as possible. It also acknowledges the short shelf-life of most satire. Discussing an old Cambridge Footlights comic ...”

“... problem. This is one short section in a book that, industry by industry, systematically uncovers self-servingness wherever it exists. But Dorothy’s experiments in efficiency come about partly as a reaction to the weakness of her husband, a gentleman farmer of the old school who doesn’t like to see animals suffer. She realised something had to be done on ...”

“... refused to renew the station’s public licence, though it remains online. The opposition was also self-pityingly silly to boycott the assembly elections at the end of 2005. But it may not be impotent for ever. Its more sensible members, like the provincial governor who stood against Chávez last December, see that the poor have now to be included, and only 15 ...”

“... a lot in common with, for example, Chris Moyles. Moyles is the BBC Radio 1 breakfast DJ – the self-styled Saviour of Radio 1 – who has just published a volume of memoirs, The Gospel According to Chris Moyles.* I’m not going to compare the book to Dylan’s Chronicles: Moyles’s book is one of the worst I have ever read, and Dylan’s is one of the ...”

“... To rescue every single work of antiquity from obscurity: the scale of the work was endless, self-obliterating. And yet ‘I have never yet produced a book with which I felt satisfied.’ It’s always hard to tell with the humanists – ornamental emotion is de rigueur – but I think this was true, or true enough. It’s not that Aldus was never ...”

“... in these ten or twelve pages is of the sort that Chekhov put in the mouth of the dissatisfied and self-critical young writer Treplev in The Seagull:The description of a moonlit night is long and stilted. Trigorin has worked out a process of his own, and descriptions are easy for him. He writes that the neck of a broken bottle lying on the bank glimmered in ...”

“... the sexual organs with a clasp’) was one such offering; another was the self-explanatory definition of ‘devirgination’. He was one of three of Murray’s readers to scrutinise John Bulwer’s 1650 Anthropometamorphosis: Man Transform’d, or, the Artificall Changling; between them they submitted more than a thousand slips dealing ...”

“... us who were at [the university of] Basle have come to nothing.’ This may not have been baseless self-deprecation: an acquaintance warned him that ‘I have never seen students rise. They are always more remiss and prone to slacking.’ Rütiner noted ruefully how this had been said ‘in a harsh tone, as if they were reproaching me. From then on I was more ...”

“... respectful of and sympathetic to his protagonists while always alert to the possibility of self-misrepresentation. Yet the liminal terrain of Gulag medicine also complicates the popular binary between ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ in states that use terror against their citizens. Solzhenitsyn would have it that, as collaborators in the ...”

“... unpaved campo; ringed around it were pawnshops, butchers, a bakery, a tavern. The community was self-governing, a ghetto republic within the Most Serene Republic: the Jews looked after their own finances, legislation, security, sanitation. Jewish confraternities emerged to feed and clothe the poor, to care for orphans and the sick. The earliest inhabitants ...”

“... with Carter and Pollard, all Oxbridge erudition and easy privilege. For this new generation of self-styled ‘Biblio Boys’, Wise was an object of snobbish ridicule, a pompous old bore who would harangue colleagues with his ‘ugly cockney voice’. At heart, then, this is a story about class and status. Books, for Wise, meant social currency as much as ...”

“... on the concept of the ‘spy’ in contemporary life – if a spy is a person who creates a false self in order to achieve material comfort. Still, I would have preferred a ...”

“... centuries later. But then, for us, Bonfire Night was all about feeling not thinking, an atavism of self-enchantment, a ripple in time from our ancestors outfacing the cold, dark harbingers of winter with heat and light. And what better way to make light than with fireworks? Even the lid of the box was gaudily thrilling, like a fairground or circus. And beneath ...”