“... 1895 were busy for Oscar Wilde. In late January he was in Algiers with Alfred Douglas. He wrote to Robert Ross: ‘There is a great deal of beauty here. The Kabyle boys are quite lovely. At first we had some difficulty procuring a proper civilised guide. But now it is all right and Bosie and I have taken to haschish: it is quite exquisite: three puffs of smoke ...”

“... which would really be more accurately described as a decade and a half of abject self-prostration. Such empire as the Americans have had never of course depended on colonisation, a category disallowed by their own ideology of origins. It depended on something more novel, and ambiguous: the self-colonisation ...”

“... points out, ‘all the faces suggest the same even and unruffled temper, a complete command of self coupled with a sociable ease in the presence of others’; and while certain gestures may suggest the sitters are about to speak, as a rule they appear ‘more inclined to listen’. The sitters almost never seem to speak, either, in the other genre of ...”

“... a certain vagueness to the reality of the texts. In any case, the fact that Duras and her husband, Robert Antelme, joined the Resistance in 1943, and that Antelme was arrested and deported to Buchenwald, made any worries about her early novels seem less pressing. I now think that my own will to preserve the faint aura of mystery surrounding early Duras at the ...”

“... in the personality of his subject. He accepts the account of Rhodes’s restless mind given by Robert Rotberg in The Founder (1988), which remains compelling even if some of its psychoanalysis now seems forced (Rhodes has middle-child energy and is locked in an ‘oedipal struggle’ with President Kruger of the Transvaal). Rather than fleshing out ...”

“... lost his father’s religious framework as a young man but read avidly in theology, philosophy and self-improving literature, searching for another set of values to shape his existence. He found one in the duty of work – for its own sake, but also in order to understand the underlying order of the world and ‘discern its harmonies’, as he put it in a ...”

“... between Presbyterians and Independents, the former desiring a national church and the latter self-governing congregations; then an explosion of exotically named sects – Ranters, Seekers, Muggletonians, Grindletonians; and in America the showdown between the ruling Calvinists and ‘Antinomian’ dissidents. Cries of blasphemy and heresy arose on all ...”

“... special operators from the War on Terror years have specialised in a different genre: the business self-help manual. These former military officers feel that a career spent planning deadly missions and leading men into messy wars makes them uniquely qualified to offer ‘Battle-Tested Strategies for Creating Successful Organisations and Inspiring Extraordinary ...”

“... Australia, created by a Labor government ‘to help the sons and daughters of the working man’), self-education (he called his intellectual autobiography A blacksmith looks at a university) and afforestation. Three of his children passed through the University but the fourth struggled at school and was exiled (‘Dad didn’t believe in failure’) up to a ...”

“... means or another. Despite the many who hated him, he died in bed. For I refer, of course, to Sir Robert Walpole, prime minister from 1722 to 1742, architect of the Whig supremacy, hammer of the Tories. His long tenure of power reminds us that Britain’s much-vaunted two-party system has in the past often given way in practice to something approximating to a ...”

“... however invidious comparisons may be, is of a mixture of Browning, Hugo Von Hofmannsthal and Robert Lowell, with something of Whitman’s breezy effect of easing himself in poetry’s words. If that sounds bizarre – well, she is in many ways a bizarre writer. Her ways with rhythm and sound effects seem too spontaneous to be experimental, though they ...”

“... has been used affirmatively by sexual minorities for the elaboration of appetite into self-definition, it has not been used by them for its regulation. And the general recognition and institutionalisation of the variety of sexual experience has had a relativising effect on traditional morality – the morality that privileges and circumscribes a ...”

“... of my country.’ He attacks the ‘affected purity’ of the French language and asserts that the self-conscious perfectionism of French writers has ‘unsinewed’ their heroic verse. Virgil identifies Aeneas’s founding of Rome with Augustus’s long stable rule, and Dryden’s version is informed by his experience of civil war, restoration, rebellion and ...”

“... for his ideals, but he is more of a Thomas Mann-style grand bourgeois. Perhaps the multiple self-portraits make sense: there’s always more than one Hans Fallada. In Fallada’s 1942 memoir, Damals bei uns daheim (Our Home in Days Gone By), he describes himself as a Pechvogel, an unlucky devil, who fell down a flight of stairs when he was three and ...”

“... turn on the encounter between the energetic yet dreamy narrator, moving ‘in a boyish euphoria of self-sufficiency’, as he puts it in Behind the Wall: A Journey through China, and the sometimes deflating realities he finds. Once these have made him feel grizzled and disabused he’ll have a moment of human contact or a brush with the beautiful, but either ...”