“... her youngish diaries are sometimes convincingly happy-go-lucky, but the reminiscences by her older self sound rather as if she is ‘pretending everything is OK’. This is the third volume of her autobiography. Both the preceding volumes dealt with her merry young life during World War Two, which she much enjoyed: they have been read aloud as the BBC’s Book ...”

“... bust. And he commissioned Roubiliac to do a sculpture of Shakespeare in the guise of a prosperous self-made professional just like himself. He also re-wrote the plays in accordance with bourgeois sensibilities.Yet the cult of Shakespeare flourished because he could be plausibly presented as outsoaring mere sectional interests. By the time of Garrick’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... truss, worn from boyhood, and of Updike’s father’s ‘pathetic sweat-stained truss’ in Self-Consciousness. Constance’s mother dies of an aggravated rupture, caused by lifting her invalid husband from bed to bathchair and back again: ‘my mother unconscious and gasping in an awful way looked quite different – sunken and grey. Grandmamma was ...”

“... genetic make-up or evolutionary history of the organism that does the suffering. If this is not self-evident, then consider the following hypothetical cases. Martians invade earth and proceed to enslave and exploit human beings: they do to us all the things we now do to our fellow species on earth. Our lives accordingly become a hell of ...”

“... revolutions, in a series of profiles of, say, Davy, Faraday, Babbage, the Brunels – the self-made men and their machines. They emerge just sufficiently distinguishable from one another and from the politicians and artists they are seen rubbing shoulders with – who in due course appear in clusters of profiles too. While never sounding remotely ...”

“... to bottom of Israeli society in the aftermath of victory in the Six-Day War. Whether it was the self-assurance of the military which infected the politicians, or the politicians’ commitment to the status quo which subtly influenced the outlook of the military, is not easy to determine. What is clear is that when the country was about to confront a ...”

“... various transformations and dilutions, provides no excuse for the falsifications, compromises and self-deceit which Communists had to practise, but it does give such evasions a framework which is not wholly evil. Yevtushenko is not evil, though he did well in an evil system: he took care of number one, but he also had some care for others. Few, in the moral ...”

“... work as a historian can never be trusted and who had had a ‘disastrous effect’ on the national self-consciousness. If Marxism has erected signposts sunk in concrete, deconstruction removes all permanent landmarks from the landscapes of the past, downgrading or elevating history (according to your point of view) to an inherently unstable ‘discourse’ not ...”

“... was weakening and that their campaign should therefore be intensified. Yet this terrorism is self-defeating, because its persistence is one reason why Britain cannot abandon Northern Ireland. Britain is in any case bound by the treaty to make no constitutional changes without majority consent in Northern Ireland – a crucially important fact to which ...”

“... his name-saint cannot be a coincidence and Boucher argues persuasively that it may also be a self-portrait. At present the lighting on the statue creates numerous shadows that the sculptor cannot have intended, dust has darkened the salient portions (meant to be the lightest) and the baton held in the saint’s right hand has not been extended with a ...”

“... 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 ...”