“... merely into his colleagues’ frailties, but also into the chaotic, unprincipled, sentimental and self-interested forces which are the true inflators of public expenditure. Part of his excuse for dwelling with such apparent distaste on so many close colleagues (this one an abominable bully, that one an ingratiating but manic populist, another a commercial ...”

“... rhyming ‘persona’ with ‘landowner’ but Thomas’s ‘face ... Shining with pleasant self-esteem’ is surely a fresher rendering of the squire’s physiognomy, and the same might be said of other passages in the two versions. My small acquaintance with Russian does not extend to the subtler nuances, but I suspect that in these and other ...”

“... said that literature, her kind of literature (literature with a capital ‘L’), was frivolous, self-indulgent, élitist. That its study was irrelevant and mandarin. That those who studied it were incapable of recognising the true richness of life, preferring instead the rarefied air of artificial heights. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘don’t take it so ...”

“... was more or less skilled) was, but was not, radically-inclined. Samuel Smiles was a Scotsman, and self-help and thrift were in his native air, inspiring the growth of co-operative societies and a most significant Temperance Movement, which arguably played the same role in the origins and early days of the Labour Party as Non-conformity did in England. The ...”

“... now further assume that the pilot made a further off-the-cuff decision to disregard even his own self-devised flight plan and to make a minor cross-cut to save fuel. (The fact that this would, as Hersh admits, have saved negligible fuel we ignore.) This means that we also have to assume that the pilot deliberately lied to ground control in reporting his ...”

“... remains. Andreas Baader, the undisputed leader of the group, was, from his earliest years, a self-willed, highly-talented nonconformist. Insolent, humorous and rebellious, he seems never to have obeyed any rules and had to change schools repeatedly. His last headmaster spoke of him as ‘a particularly gifted young man’, but noted that he got into so ...”

“... also finely verbal. Burrows’s commentary on the diagram wittily sums up his findings: Chiefly in self-gratifying anecdotes, Lydia uses ‘was’ at eight times as high a rate as Collins. With his honoured patroness ever foremost in his talk, if not quite foremost in his mind, Collins uses ‘her’ at almost eight times as high a rate as Lydia, who has ...”

“... character: the British, while praising their own character, blamed the modern age and its heedless self-confidence. According to Filson Young, a down-market man of letters, it was ‘an impious blasphemy’ even to have conceived of building a ship of such ‘monstrous proportions’. The Bishop of Winchester described the Titanic as ‘a monument to human ...”

“... George Arthur, governor of Van Diemen’s Land or Tasmania from 1824, was a puritanically self-righteous person, convinced that mankind is ‘born and saturated in wickedness’ and that his wards, in particular, required to be treated accordingly. He came from the Army; so did many others, of more commonplace military cast, accustomed to corporal ...”

“... of German colonialism. There was no equivalent in Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945 of the self-proclaimed mission of modernisation and civilisation enshrined in the educational, economic and religious policies adopted in the final phase of German colonial rule. It took the brutalising influence of the First World War – itself part of colonialism’s ...”

“... but it can’t be said that we really know him. A life has been filled in for us, but not a self. He remains as unknowable at the end as he was at the beginning, and indeed seems to leave the book as randomly and as unexpectedly as he entered it. Sebald deliberately layers his narrative, so that Austerlitz is difficult to get close to. Jacques tells his ...”

“... art was, and where it began and ended. A painting’s separate firm standing in the world – its self-fulfilling tone-poem completeness – was for him an article of faith. Art was always art, for Nicholson, by virtue of its internal arrangement. His pictures are always fundamentally – in their formal logic – pictures within pictures. They unfold from a ...”

“... to objection too, and not only because even those happily free of the Protestant tic for psychic self-urtication may agree that present consumption should sometimes be deferred in favour of investment for the future. In fact, the full-on now-for-now view may be not just non-obvious, but even mildly touched. In a celebrated thought experiment, Robert Nozick ...”

“... of elected reps, from Winston Churchill to Tony Benn, for whom, at times, eloquence and historical self-consciousness have seemed ends in themselves. Yet there is another less exalted political figure the mayor recalls: Alastair Campbell. A journalist like Johnson, Campbell tried to shorten the old PR sequence that traditionally went from politician’s ...”

“... de Florentia’). The unusually youthful features of St Luke have been canvassed as an early self-portrait. For the next 15 years, until his early death in 1457, he worked like a fury, mostly in Florence and mostly in fresco, producing a series of dramatic masterpieces of which only a fraction survive, among them the grave and melancholy Last Supper in ...”