“... uncertainty not really found in the American poets often pervades Apollinaire’s acts of poetic self-naming, even in lines seemingly brimming with confidence: ‘Je lègue à l’avenir l’histoire de Guillaume Apollinaire’ (‘I bequeath to the future the story of Guillaume Apollinaire’). He was not just fatherless but divided in his national identity ...”

“... have to explain why he thought Obama was the worst president maybe ever. To his base, it was self-evident. This was all happening while Trump was running for president, and sometimes it seemed as though the two men shared the same campaign. Rather than drain the swamp, Eric swore to ‘blow up’ Jefferson City, the state capital, while also promising ...”

“... from his context. Popularising Science has further, more serious problems: it is littered with self-aggrandising remarks; whole sections from one chapter are reproduced verbatim in another; and it follows Ronald Clark’s biography of Haldane from 1968 a little too closely, and without attribution. Dronamraju, a geneticist, is good on Haldane’s ...”

“... consequences such ‘small special points’ might have. As he wrote in the characteristically self-effacing preface, ‘the subject may appear an insignificant one, but we shall see that it possesses some interest; and the maxim de minimis non curat lex [‘the law does not concern itself with trifles’] does not apply to science.’ Nor does it apply to ...”

“... the rest of the Company’s; or if you have any design to draw us into Expence, you will find your self deceiv’d, for we are not Persons to be led by the Nose into such an Inconveniency.The string of puns here – some helpfully indicated by italics – draws the reader’s attention away from the dignity of the argument. The club’s members are right to be ...”

“... briefly, somebody we’ve lost. Nikolai thinks the idea is naff – the premise of ‘a mediocre self-help book’ cooked up by a ‘middling delusionist’ who also happens to be his mother. ‘The essence of growing up,’ he explains in the first of their dialogues, ‘is to play hide and seek with one’s mother successfully.’ There’s nothing like ...”

“... kept him company, so to speak, in his dotage. Wilhelm, the father, himself the only child of self-obsessed parents, is bitter, spiteful, vain, distracted, sardonic when not scathing, and very handsome. Born of a German mother to an itinerant Neapolitan, he is blond in a world where everyone is dark. Arturo reads that blondness, which he doesn’t ...”

“... face of pressure from Beijing, several new organisations emerged, led by young people advocating self-determination or outright independence for Hong Kong. These groups launched a campaign aimed at ‘reclaiming’ (guangfu) local places. Young people who’d been involved in the Umbrella Movement began to connect social welfare issues and disputes over ...”

“... Marxist’. I am not sure I understand what that label means. One of the last major figures to self-identify that way was Eduard Bernstein, who pioneered democratic socialism in the German parliamentary system. But Ypi seems to mean something more general: a lingering suspicion that the left will forget about universal morality in its headlong pursuit of ...”

“... persona, a breadth of voice, a large collection of masks, the favourite being timid, little, self-effacing Lorine. ‘Lorine was shy and unworldly,’ Jerry Reisman wrote, ‘but she was lively and talkative when with people she liked. Her sense of humour sparkled in conversation as it does in her poetry and sometimes she was surprisingly ...”

“... were ‘low’ because an educated, erudite, gentlemanly writer was stooping. For Richardson, the self-made former apprentice boy, who later gave Clarissa the appearance of literariness by inserting gobbets from a dictionary of literary ‘beauties’, the charge was altogether more significant. The originality of Pamela was its transformation of ...”

“... to chime with public discourse and concerns. Thomas was still elaborating his fantasies of the self, but these now included the suffering selves around him, thus in ‘Ceremony after a Fire Raid’: ‘Myselves/The grievers/Grieve.’ And, even when refusing to mourn, his verse is attuned to what occasioned the mourning of others. Meanwhile, Eliot was ...”

“... of us, however indifferent or hostile, must sit up and take notice. Inept, bungled and irrational self-sacrifice can be seductive and inspirational, especially in the cynical public world which Leopardi describes. These extremes call to each other. One man who certainly took notice was the hero of Keates’s book, Daniele Manin, who four years later would ...”

“... contrast, the sermons of Donne were marred, Eliot thought, by their proto-modernity, an excess of self-indulgent personalism. Donne, ‘the religious spell-binder . . . the flesh-creeper, the sorcerer of emotional orgy’, had about him the whiff of ‘impure motives’ and ‘facile success’. Interestingly, in developing this comparison, Eliot mobilised ...”

“... sometimes sardonic enquiry into what polio revealed about his own country and his own family. Self-pity, evidently, is an old enemy long ago dealt with, as the book’s final words show. ‘Very occasionally well-meaning people suggested to me as a child that sufferings built character and endurance. Even at the age of seven or eight I suspected I had ...”