“... Without being timid about his own artistic worth, he largely resisted the normal mechanisms of self-promotion. He turned down the Légion d’Honneur (while accepting foreign honours with no cachet in Paris), refused to have anything to do with musical cliques, detested deference or homage, and was so secretive (if that’s the right word for simply not ...”

“... without noticing it. The first European to discover the Mississippi from the sea was René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, who was assisted by local Indian guides in 1682. On a riverbank several days upstream La Salle shouted ‘Vive le Roi!’ and claimed the Mississippi Basin for Louis XIV. He named the vast territory, amounting to a third of the ...”

“... the accused has ever admitted to any specific acts, though Jake Prescott wrote to one bomb victim, Robert Carr, apologising for the attack on him (an apology graciously accepted), and John Barker has stated that ‘the police framed a guilty man.’ The convicted Anna Mendelson publishes poetry under another name and the acquitted Angela Weir became the ...”

“... Lady: The Diaries of Elisabeth von Stahlenberg 1933-1948, or fictional autobiographies such as Robert Graves’s I, Claudius, or Danny Hill: Memoirs of a Prominent Gentleman (edited by Francis King) and Margaret Forster’s ‘edition’ of Thackeray’s Memoirs of a Victorian Gentleman, the book mingled respected literary figures still alive in Britain ...”

“... Both phrases are perfectly clear, yet each is as far as possible from what the insufferable Robert Nye commends in the diction of Grigson: ‘how close that idiom comes to living speech’. Much virtue in that ‘living’! For Gurney, the life that there is in English speech has been injected into it by lonely, learned and masterfully artificial ...”

“... easy to exaggerate the international power of the Jews,’ the Foreign Office Under-Secretary Lord Robert Cecil said. Segev quotes a character in The Thirty-Nine Steps airing the common prejudice that ‘the Jew is everywhere . . . He’s the man who is ruling the world just now.’ Although Zionist leaders could turn these anti-semitic notions to their own ...”

“... Man, whose mentality was once described by Esmond Romilly as a ‘mixture of profit-seeking, self-interest, cheap emotion and organised brutality’, and his reflections on the cargo plane struck exactly the note of amoral, self-pitying, tinpot fatalism adopted by most Nazi and SS survivors facing defeat and ...”

“... future. Not ‘When was Germany?’ but ‘When will Germany be?’If ‘Germany’ was a Hegelian self-realising subject, ascending from mere ‘phenomenal’ particularity to a destined universality, what sort of statehood should it attain? Clearly, a precondition for the true Germany was something like unity. The patchwork of principalities must melt into ...”

“... face I realised I had caught a piece of lost time. Not only Madrid and Dr Barros and an earlier self, but Viridiana as it felt when I first saw it: blasphemous, brilliant, ragged, indifferent to the preoccupations of unity and coherence which most aesthetics demand – Saturn swallowing a daughter.If I had been less devoted to the notion of the death of the ...”

“... Scotland mattered to England. On both sides of the border, monarchs made claims about status and self-sufficiency, drawing on classical iconography, Renaissance architecture, the curbing of magnate power and a consolidation of boundaries. These processes developed in Scotland as a result of James V’s residence in France, his French marriages and ...”

“... countrymen, who seemed to have a talent for revolution but no corresponding talent for self-government; more broadly, its target was every anxious liberal who sympathised with the political and economic aspirations of the less favoured members of society, but feared their predilection for dictators, every liberal whose instincts were ...”

“... of disciples in the Lower Fourth, the really superior person, not saint, not sage, but outcast, self-abandoned. Waugh had the same school-world dreams in social form, and they continue to exercise a fascination – crude, perhaps, but potent. His popularity shows, among other things, how those with the instinct to opt out have a keen relish for opting in at ...”

“... also a risky, flamboyant, long-sustained star performance, complete with pratfalls and buffoonery, self-mockery and self-castigation. Anything she dishes out she is more than ready to take; and as a performer, she has never shirked making an idiot of herself, or washing bloody knickers in public. The querulous critic can be ...”

“... southern Argentina. And he is certainly not the embodiment of Indian aspirations for justice and self-realisation: ‘After several hours we were forced into conversation with the only other white people on board, the only people we could talk to since the wary Indians offered no more than monosyllabic replies to questions from outsiders. In fact, these kids ...”

“... had possessed the native cynicism of Leigh Hunt himself, or – a rather different kind – of Robert Bloomfield, the rustic poet who in 1804 had been paid nearly £4000 for his two little volumes, he would have ruined his gift but he might have made big money. As it was, his best things are so good because they were not the things he wanted to do. The ...”