“... Indian affairs: ‘if the Bill passes, I am no more a king,’ he said with his usual histrionic self-pity (a characteristic failing of princes, then and now). It also evinces the electrifying effect of the king’s disapproval on those who hoped for further favours – a step up in the peerage or a juicy sinecure. Merely by letting it be known that ‘I ...”

“... was living in France in her twenties. It is from that Gallimard edition, annotated by her younger self, that she starts translating many years later. ‘What is hard to determine,’ she writes, ‘is what sort of influence reading Proust for the first time had had on me as a young writer.’I was dumbfounded, because my first thought on reading The End of ...”

“... to pursue their own private vendettas. An Asháninka group portrait from In the Amazon Jungles, a self-serving account published in 1932 by Fernando Stahl, a Seventh Day Adventist missionary, presents a prodigiously sullen group cradling chin-high bows and the occasional antiquated rifle. ‘A band of murderers,’ Stahl glosses. Photographs from the ...”

“... team for the task ahead’ – the task of leaving the EU. Johnson, in Gove’s view, lacked the self-discipline and consistency needed to be prime minister (curiously, he seems to have changed his mind since then). Gove decided to stand himself; Johnson immediately pulled out of the race. But Gove’s reputation was damaged by his assassination of Johnson ...”

“... a panicked run of chickens – not so much chickens as a true whirling impression of chickens. In Self-Portrait of 1885 her brush and palette – despite being things of the utmost centrality to her life – are reduced to a few cursory brown lines and a tomato-red squiggle. By the end of this development – in Young Girl with a Greyhound (1893), Young Girl ...”

“... around this time, ‘the sex appeal of the inorganic’. In his documentary The Century of the Self (2002), Adam Curtis argues that advertising co-opted psychoanalysis, and the same could be said of Surrealism – that advertising exploited its art of subliminal suggestion for the purposes of commercial persuasion. For Danchev this is no bad thing. He ...”

“... whom even on his best day should want to be judged next to Karel on the merits of character. The self-absorption, the petty rivalries, the absurd, childish, overweening demands, the ravenous greed which characterise in varying degrees the behaviour of the rest of us never appeared to engage Karel sufficiently to make any claim on him. My experience with him ...”

“... experiencing a proper ‘bourgeois revolution’ (along the lines of 1789) or developing a fully self-conscious or revolutionary proletariat. Britain’s empire engendered an inflated sense of political and economic grandeur, but two world wars and subsequent decolonisation left an exhausted nation without any tradition of innovation or democracy to draw ...”

“... good book about the ball-tampering story and the cricket culture behind it. So Australia are the self-appointed experts on the game’s ethos, while repeatedly violating it and the actual rules. Those rules talk about ‘the spirit of cricket’, thus making cricket the only game in which respecting the implicit ethos is explicitly part of the rules. All ...”

“... of leaves and load detailed information about the leaf’s parent tree onto your iPhone. What self-respecting hipster wouldn’t want a mobile app that tells them the gender ratio – computed in real time – at their favourite bar, based on the pictures gathered by cameras installed at the bar’s entrance and exit? (That would be the popular SceneTap ...”

“... The implosion of the financial system vindicated him against his critics, who had declared markets self-stabilising and government intervention counterproductive. With trade, investment and consumption collapsing and millions cast into unemployment, the world was desperate for fiscal stimulus, and there were calls on all sides for greater controls on banking ...”

“... two years previously. The RAF was out to annihilate the island for ever and with it Germany’s self-respect. Had Germany not suffered enough? A number of initiatives began to document ‘British atrocities’ against ‘the German island’.Rüger goes on to provide a fascinating and ironic account of how the fate of Heligoland was now woven into the cause ...”

“... deployed to puncture and deflate any moment when excessive ickiness started creeping in. Dad gets self-pitying and clichéd; ‘Eugh,’ Crow says, ‘you sound like a fridge magnet.’ Lanny is less simple and more ambitious, encompassing vaster territory, describing an archetype of a village that also represents the whole of England. Toothwort’s memory ...”

“... ways of reading across life and work, combining print and manuscript sources, placing self-lacerating diary entries alongside a differently devastating polemic – that might not otherwise be available. Johnson’s writings seemed to his contemporaries to offer personal guidance for all stages of life. Chance acquaintances, regular correspondents ...”

“... then Ross’s freedom to see them independently might have been curtailed by a million yelps of self-interest. People speak to you because they have their own story in mind and want you to write it.Ross went her own way with the detail, but the reader will trust it if the work is done and the sentences are good.The door of Huston’s suite was opened by a ...”