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“... other composers in the American maverick tradition, from Charles Ives, Cage and Morton Feldman to Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix and Sun Ra.The revolution that began at the Five Spot was part of the wider black freedom struggle, as well as an extension of an American philosophy of self-reliance and artistic emancipation that ...”

“... of two and lived with a succession of relatives; at the age of five he went to boarding-school. Robert McCrum calculates that ‘in total, Wodehouse saw his parents for barely six months between the ages of three and 15.’ After he left Dulwich College, to which he remained deeply attached for the rest of his life, his father got him a job at the Hong Kong ...”

“... a bit ‘like a jockey’. But everybody noticed that Nijinsky had a supernatural-seeming gift for self-transformation. It was a gift so extreme it had always seemed capable of unbalancing his mind. While watching him in Le Spectre de la rose, Cocteau remarked that Nijinsky was like ‘some melancholy, imperious scent’, that ‘evaporates through the window ...”

“... to say that Hunt didn’t possess his own kind of vanity, ‘a little over-bearing, over-weening self-complacency’, as Hazlitt described it. When he and his brother John were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in 1812 for libelling the Prince Regent, Hunt offered a teasingly serene, not to say Skimpolean face to the public: ‘Our Prosecutors will ...”

“... supposed threat to traditional religion. What made it different was the leadership of the lawyer Robert Aske, leadership of a kind which had been lacking in Lincolnshire. For Aske had charisma and, it appears, boundless personal ambition. It was Aske who invented the logo ‘Pilgrimage of Grace’, declaring himself ‘chief captain’ of the Pilgrimage, and ...”

“... the most memorable creations in his gallery of bien-pensant absurdity was the trendy filmmaker and self-publicist Neville Dreadberg, whose documentary Blood Orange was imagined as depicting the cannibalistic practices of rank and file Ulster Unionists. In a variant on the traditional Ulster fry-up – and Swift’s Modest Proposal – Wharton described ...”

“... tries to be bubbly about its degeneracy, but it’s mostly just a jokeless, pulpless exercise in self-abuse. Of course it tends to like lagers and motors, fighting and hooligans, and imagines the rest of the world is fraudulent and missing out because it has other things on its mind. What’s sad about the magazine is that, despite its defensive bluster, it ...”

“... the 20th century. Both fled their home cities as children to escape racial violence: Gordon, the Robert Charles riots of 1900, in which a mob of white Southerners murdered dozens after an African American man shot a police officer who had asked what he was doing in a mainly white neighbourhood; Croll, the Odessa pogrom of 1905, in which more than four ...”

“... an ironmonger to cast it and an artilleryman to load, point and fire it.’Since laws are not self-executing, one concern is that the ideal of the rule of law becomes the rule of those empowered to enforce the law. This worry – usually attributed to Thomas Hobbes, but it too can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle – is often expressed in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... but they could not bear to see it befouled by warmongers and racists. All of them could see the self-evident connection between the rise of the war party in Washington and the defeat of civil rights and the ‘Great Society’. Many of them came from families where military service was a proud axiom. All of them felt guilty and indebted for their luck. At ...”

“... Union Jacks hanging limp at either side of the podium suggest a newish nation-state searching for self-confidence, one of the lesser-known stans perhaps. The lectern has ‘DOWNING STREET’ gilded on it, as though we might forget where we are.But the gimcrack fixtures and fittings should not delude us. This is intended to be a crucial new space in British ...”

“... years shows. This journal, judiciously quoted in his memoir Rebecca’s Vest, had some of the self-arraigning qualities of old Presbyterian spiritual diaries and some Romantic young Werther posing, but disciplined by a vigilant sense of irony about his own emotions. Later in his life, he was to defend intelligent ...”

“... the monument. It’s at its best when it is all dressed up, most real when it’s at its most sham self. The architect and pamphleteer Thomas ‘Victorian’ Harris fretted about the 19th century’s inability to create an architecture peculiar to itself, its age, its engineering, its steam power and its myriad inventions, all the while failing to see that ...”

“... 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 ...”