“... our sense of it is mostly derived from his own writings. He had an almost obsessive interest in self-portrayal. The Canzoniere is a kind of emotional autobiography; the Posteritati (‘Letter to Posterity’), which gives an account of his life up to 1351, is no less carefully tailored. As a young man he studied law in Montpellier and Bologna, but swiftly ...”

“... a close though unequal alliance. Cassiodorus’ chronicle, not an official product but a politic self-advertisement, situated the consular pair of 519 at the end of a long list of Roman rulers going back beyond Romulus to Aeneas, Latinus and the beginnings of history. It proclaimed that the Gothic dynasty was the legitimate successor to the emperors, to ...”

“... in his memoirs that ‘the whore is a bad apple … there is a big brown bruise on her soul, of self-indulgence and selfishness.’ But traffickers and pimps were also vile: ‘the lowest form of animal life on the criminal scale’. This introduced a contradiction into the policing of prostitution. For officers dealing with international trafficking, the ...”

“... on the wartime national debt. The cost of empire outside India was modest, especially once self-government was granted to the settler colonies in the 1840s and 1850s, and the Indian regime paid for itself (as far as the domestic taxpayer was concerned), even after the East India Company was effectively abolished in 1858. Government and Parliament ...”

“... with organic agriculture; female members took leadership roles. The goal was to incubate self-governed Kurdish institutions within the Turkish state, resorting to violence only if their autonomy was threatened. ‘We will put Bookchin’s ideas into practice as the first society that establishes a tangible democratic confederalism,’ an anonymous ...”

“... sleaze and corruption appeared in the Telegraph. The piece lambasted ‘the deep complacency and self-serving nature of the British establishment’ and railed against the way ‘donors end up with peerages in the House of Lords’. The conclusion was damning. ‘Our problem is not really about individual politicians, nor even political parties. The problem ...”

“... fascists and Bolshevists, the feel of satin; who was dolphin-like in his movements, an obsessive self-googler before easy engines existed, who could not spell ‘tongue’ correctly on the first try. Every writer should have such a pedant – every writer should have two, returning in the evenings to commune over the crucial works, the neglected ...”

“... gave him his cards ‘for good and sufficient cause’, Keaton was stripped of everything but his self-loathing. What followed were a few unmoored years of benders and breakdowns.In 1940, Keaton Productions Inc. was dissolved; his life as a filmmaker was over. In the same year, the 21-year-old dancer Eleanor Norris became Keaton’s third wife. (His second ...”

“... of white supremacy. The atmosphere in the town is one of preserved time; too content and self-satisfied with its sense of liberality, it denies the history of New England while seeming to embrace it. It seeks to draw visitors into a cocoon of English colonial history, memorialising the arrival and settlement in 1639 of a band of Puritans under the ...”

“... he’s very generous, helping friends down on their luck, dispensing large sums without fuss or self-congratulation. He’s always funny, and the book hasn’t diminished my admiration for his style or his industry, though it’s hard to envy him his back pain, his sometimes disastrous women and his two marriages. I like the sound of his brother, Sandy, his ...”

“... and claiming that she wrote it when she was drunk. Freud speculated that writers turn the crude, self-aggrandising materials of daydreams into literature. Rereading L’Amant, I can’t help thinking that it contains a good deal of ego-boosting romantic fantasy. A ravishing, sexually magnetic impoverished young woman lords it over a rich lover, half-mad with ...”

“... gold reserves, actually) to finance imports of consumer goods during the turbulent transition to a self-sustaining economy seem implausible – cautious leaders would hardly use this high-risk strategy. There are additional difficulties. Political culture – a factor as important as it is elusive – might prove an obstacle. The double reform will not succeed ...”

“... make sense of complex or problematic novels or poems is to read them with a mind unburdened by the self-denying ordinances of modern critical dogma.’ But of course there are other forms of prejudice. Problems arising from arguments about truth and prejudice were to lead to noisy arguments about Donne. I believe firmly that Empson was a great critic, but have ...”

“... of the revolution. Unemployed, indeed largely unemployable, given to all manner of anti-social and self-destructive behaviour, and filled with an incoherent rage and bitterness, they provide a potential constituency for the radical populists of the PAC and the ANC Left. The most publicised members of this latter group are Harry Gwala, the Natal ANC-SACP ...”

“... or moral superiority, just genuine lack of interest. I wish it would all go away. Sickened by the self-righteousness of the newspapers, which, though it takes a different form, is as nauseating in the Independent as it is in the Sun. Depressed too by the continuing corruption of public life, ex-members of the Government moving straight onto the boards of the ...”