“... of infant Harold and his dad outside Number Ten.) The humdrum chapel morality; the Nonconformist self-righteousness; the passive-aggressive display – when the antagonist was insecure enough – of a homespun Yorkshire chauvinism. I did not know, until I ploughed through Ziegler’s lustreless narrative, that the undergraduate Wilson had had a flirtation ...”

“... web of production, were, at the same time, and much more than their capitalist equivalents, self-contained worlds. Heads of enterprises may have been divorced from decisions on price, marketing and quality, but they were intimately engaged in the role of ‘father to their workers’ – for whom they provided food, medical services, education and ...”

“... were not on their side the whole rationale of radical politics was undermined. But what price self-respect if one had to look cravenly for favour from a white establishment which, under Leo Boyd, the Durban mayor of the time, was urging that the solution to ‘the Indian problem’ was ‘boats, not votes’ (i.e. ship them back to India rather than ...”

“... books, a kind of de-graded art, hybrid, impure, heterogeneous, visionary, obscene, dangerous, self-contradictory, chaotic? Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism cites Blake’s remark in its early pages in order to mediate an assertion and a denial. The assertion is that culture is a crucial factor in the desire to found and maintain imperial ...”

“... the 19th century, when homosexuality was made into a disease rather than just a sin or crime, that self-reprobation became a real problem for practising homosexuals. This is the view urged on us since Foucault, but it is difficult to believe. Heterosexual men of the 17th and 18th centuries felt a good deal of anxiety and guilt about their sexuality, and they ...”

“... dealings with Britannia Biscuits. ‘Ask him to show it to them,’ he said with great pride and self-assurance. The piece of paper, which seemed blank at first glance, had its entire space filled with three large words written with a ball-point:                 BRITANNIA                       IS ...”

“... on Communism, a consideration that overshadowed the larger debate. ‘We practised a good deal of self-censorship,’ an American historian of the post-war generation, Alfred Meyer, admitted in retrospect, ‘because we did not wish to discredit ourselves politically.’ Some leading British historians, notably Carr and Deutscher, peremptorily rejected this ...”

“... earlier scholars saw as an embarrassment or a distraction. Instead of treating the stories of his self-indulgence as an impediment that has to be circumvented to get at the ‘True Nero’ behind the purple smoke, the anecdotal is embraced wholeheartedly. We begin with a marvellous account of Nero’s cinematic career from Maria Wyke, and continue with ...”

“... male relatives witnessed at the front. Although their memories are partial and to some degree self-serving, Owings believes that most of the women told her what they thought was the truth most of the time. She records their hesitations and evasions but tries not to judge them. She also admits her original hope that women would prove to have been better ...”

“... adroit promotion of an embryo Indian empire as the heartland of world religion, and Merry’s self-promotion as ‘della Crusca’, Hannah Cowley’s as ‘Anna Matilda’ – two strangers play-acting ‘romantic’ passion in a poetic correspondence published in the magazine The World. Equally uncomfortably, McGann suffers the 1820s to drag on for eight ...”

“... intellectual ambition, domestic defiance and sexual autonomy’: but this is surely too crude and self-serving a portrait to accept at face value. Or, to take another example: to assert that ‘during the post-war period, the female malady, no longer linked to hysteria, assumed a new clinical form: schizophrenia’ is to damage one’s own case by engaging in ...”

“... to minister only to pathos and exasperation, yet at the time it was meant (with what clutching at self-deception, who can know?) to comfort. 1939? Early days? Evil days, and evil tongues, and more than tongues.The Age of Wonders has two endings, because – unusually for Appelfeld – the book is phased as two Books. Of all the novels it is the one which has ...”

“... clothes seem to be made for adults) is not a random choice. Reading Price’s extracts from the self-dramatising journal kept by Michael Leiris in the Thirties in which he describes how he robbed masks and fetishes in Africa, it is hard not to dream about returning them (and Leiris, bound hand and foot) to the tribes in question. Reading her detailed ...”

“... he wants us to like his central figures, and we do, at least at first. The dialogue is rather self-consciously written, as by an author who knows he has a reputation for crisp conversation, and the insistence on brand names sometimes seems a little strained. No car moved or drink drunk without the make and the label being dutifully spelled out, as in ...”

“... the headaches and the tinnitus he suffered from permanently, and going on in more extreme fits of self-commiseration to hint at a trepanning. He was a sensualist and an idealiser of bodies, and his own impaired one was the receipt he could afterwards show for his real but costly patriotism in 1914. Together, his medal and his disability pension authorised his ...”