“... earlier: ‘I am very fond of “Roderick Hudson” – as you know.’ Yet for every gesture of self-abasement, the letters to James also testify repeatedly to her critical acuity and to her pride in her ability to read him so well. The longest of the letters in this volume contains a small informal essay on The Portrait of a Lady, and Woolson’s ...”

“... which arises when what you’re doing is obviously wrong, and the sort which arises because of a self-imposed code of secrecy. Flash Boys has lobbed a very big, very splashy rock into the HFT pond. It’s clear that things aren’t going to go on exactly as they have been; the question is what’s going to change, and whether changing anything will actually ...”

“... has long had an agenda for court sermons, which under his leadership have become almost a self-sufficient literary category. His important book of 1998, Sermons at Court, centred not on the timeless components of Christian teaching, which preachers pass down to one another across the generations, but on the relations of the pulpit to current political ...”

“... you’re lucky, if you get another one and take the right medication you’ll be back to your old self again. But with the brain, the one you were born with either works or it goes wrong and you start sliding away from yourself. Even if a better, cleverer brain – a brainier brain – had been available for transplant I wouldn’t have traded in the addled ...”

“... the Japanese Empire built regional economic blocs in the name of the fashionable ideal of national self-sufficiency, while Britain established a system of exclusionary and preferential trade with its colonies and dominions. In the early years of World War Two, when Allied and Axis planners both began to imagine what the postwar world might look like, the ...”

“... that comes across like this is Tony Blair’s, which was also so disconnected, erratic and self-referential that it had the unmistakeable ring of authenticity. Blair jumped from subject to subject in such a peculiar way that it had to be the way his mind really worked. Interestingly, both books have sold far better than anyone expected, especially ...”

“... memory you’ll find, fumbling,/A glove to the elbow that unlocks/A Petersburg night’). She is self-dramatising in 1960’s Liebeslieder Walzer (the Violette Verdy role) and dreaming her destiny in 1977’s Vienna Waltzes (the ‘Rosenkavalier’ movement). Kendall shows us that this girl was born in Valse Triste – the haunted solo that Ivanova worked on ...”

“... Lang,’ so I gave up and called him Lang with a twang like everyone else for the simpler if less self-righteous life. So chemo’s over. A week after the last infusion, I was scanned from head to abdomen to see what, if anything, had happened. Just once the technician said ‘brain’ instead of ‘head’ and my careful poise unravelled, though not so far ...”

“... that convergence might be contrary to the trust deed. Soon afterwards I was required to provide a self-evaluation document about the institute for Ivor Crewe, who was about to carry out a major review of the funding of SAS for Hefce. ‘How far the implementation of the convergence policy is compatible with undertakings made by the university to the Warburg ...”

“... on the conversation to make a joke or say something smart. Then I go home covered with a layer of self-disgust as if I’d been rolling in donkey shit, and for a day or two afterwards, I stay in bed with the covers over my head in shame. In public and prescribed ritual, I have no easy get-out, but I can’t just get on with it. The only way I can manage ...”

“... abandoning the technical study of many works that shaped everything from the contemplation of the self – think of Augustine and Petrarch – to the contemplation of nature: in addition to Newton and Halley, think of Copernicus and Vesalius, William Gilbert and Gabriel Harvey, Bacon and Descartes. It’s hard to imagine the surgeons of the world deciding ...”

“... The milieu she describes of ‘Terry-Thomas dashers and Kay Kendall girls’ lacking in social ‘self-awareness’, for whom ‘the threat of levelling tendencies’ and ‘the encroachment of Lucky Jim Dixon’ had yet to loom, is as crude a caricature as anything in the press coverage of the Lucan affair.From this historical distance it is not only broad ...”

“... the villagers’ way of making more of it than mere survival, dents her compassion for her younger self. ‘Nervous troubles,’ she writes, ‘had yet to be invented.’ Thompson was born in 1876, the eldest child of Albert Timms, originally of Buckingham. In his youth he’d trained as a stone carver and taken part in the restoration of Bath Abbey, but his ...”

“... But Lovelock’s hypothesis also goes beyond this to claim that Gaia seeks, through a mechanism of self-regulation of the sort exhibited by organisms, to maintain factors like temperature and oxygen in states that are favourable to itself, the living Earth. The resulting conditions need not be favourable to us – we are just one part of it. The strongest ...”

“... polishing, and then presenting the results in alphabetical order. This may qualify as a piece of self-disciplined formal choosing (ascèse is the word used), but it isn’t a constraint in the Oulipo sense, lacking (as does Sphinx) the necessary element of arbitrariness. It’s true that Oulipo is supportive rather than prescriptive, but if it amounts to a ...”