“... them took their formal education very far, but many if not most were literate, and not a few were self-educated. They read for pleasure, for profit and for self-improvement, since the ability to read, and especially to figure, opened up possibilities of advancement. Those who understood at least something of navigation and ...”

“... into. Of course he wanted to put his personal stamp on US policy, and of course he offers up the self-justifications common among members of Trump’s cabinet, who have claimed at various times that they were working behind the scenes to save the country, or the party, or the presidency, from the president himself. During the first two years of Trump’s ...”

“... another man he marries a woman he doesn’t love and goes into exile on Cape Wrath. His bitter self-denial sows the seeds of his monstrous double life: after meeting Molly again in London by chance, he spends two months every year with her. Silver’s search for a story – and an identity – ends up with this Victorian melodrama at its centre. In her ...”

“... Andrew Knight was riding high. Most people lost their arguments with him. The key weapon here is self-deprecation. Deedes’s account of Conrad Black is somewhat similar, although written before he knew that the FBI had seized all Black’s hard disks: Deedes, indeed, is a bit like Robert Graves’s Claudius, surviving ...”

“... the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 2004, joining first collections by Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery and Robert Hass in a century-old series that still guarantees critical attention. But Crush was unusual in achieving not just critical acclaim but substantial popular success. Its hot-blooded, hallucinatory poems, set in a run-down, roadside-horror America, pursued ...”

“... army, obedient, punctual, untainted by education, free from seditious rage, long-suffering, self-sacrificing, grateful for the lowest wage. But a factory was not a regiment. Ruskin is quoted as saying it was ‘easy to imagine an enthusiastic affection among soldiers for the colonel, not so easy to imagine an enthusiastic affection for the proprietor of ...”

“... just happened, and then develop it into a metaphor for an existential quest. Her title, taken from Robert Frost (‘I have it in me so much nearer home/To scare myself with my own desert places’), shifts the focus from the real journey to the inner one. In a Prelude to the book, she seems to allude to Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’: ‘Sometimes it seems ...”

“... are 101 of them and their total length is considerably less than 1000 lines), he recalls Robert Graves’s suggestion that the long poem may be ‘nothing more than a poet’s attempt at greatness, at becoming “major” ’. While, on the one hand, Armitage asserts that ‘today, it is still the short poem that stays in the mind as ...”

“... One could even, metaphorically, call it an ‘explorer’ narrative, for it is partly a work of self-exploration. It seems to help, though, if we narrow our definition of ‘travel book’ or ‘travel writing’ so as to exclude real and literal explorer narratives – such a book, shall we say, as Mungo Park’s Travels. It is a memorable book, but Park ...”

“... 130 survived the journey.‘What is modern about him primarily is, if you wish, his anxiety,’ Robert Hughes later said of Arikha’s work. ‘His desire to pull something out of the flux of what is not known, and give it some kind of temporally stable form … Some of it is very risky stuff. This comes out particularly in the drawings.’ Arikha’s ...”

“... was relieved that she had chosen a reasonably promising young man whose family he knew. Mosley, Robert Cecil reported to Curzon, was ‘not in the first flight’ but had ‘a good future before him’. He was two years older than Cimmie; very dashing (though Curzon at once remarked on his ‘rather Jewish appearance’), and the youngest MP in the ...”

“... like someone embarrassed by his own seriousness rather than a natural satirist. He seemed unduly self-conscious about being committed to anything other than himself as a writer, and the studied recklessness of his remarkable style. There are novelists who want to interest the reader in their characters, and novelists who want to interest us in themselves. In ...”

“... here. What there is, however, is evidence of a much loved writer’s vexed and only partially self-aware personality. The pioneer woman is meant to be a silent type. In the 1910s Cather was a minimalist from the cornfields, a bright spot in the long shadow of Henry James. Her sentences were lucid, patient, imagistic. Like her contemporaries Sinclair Lewis ...”

“... Yeshe’s remains to deny him his final religious rites. So far, the state has responded to the self-immolations by equipping police patrols with fire extinguishers and arresting anyone who survives the flames. The authorities have also extended criminal responsibility for the act to families, communities, villages and monasteries. These measures have ...”

“... The Pebbled Shore will disappoint those who hope to learn of tensions caused by Lord Longford’s self-imposed missions to Myra Hindley and ‘Reg and Ron’ (as the Krays are referred to in his books), by the great anti-pornography campaign or by the advent of Harold Pinter into the fold. The book ends in the mid-Sixties, just as the author, in full literary ...”