“... shoulder straps’? As a modern young woman with a modicum of education and a decent allowance, self-fulfilment, not self-sacrifice, becomes her mantra. ‘Pretty mediocre’ at architecture, Pratt transfers to a course in journalism, vowing to become a writer. She joins the Tomorrow Club, precursor of International ...”

“... knew was the ace in the hole. It was a sign of how far removed Giuliani was from his former self that he seemed genuinely to believe this. ‘The old Rudy – Rudy the Justice Department hand, Rudy the prosecutor, Rudy the occasionally diligent student of government – would have known that even a stacked [Supreme] Court was going to go out of its way ...”

“... to dream away his power to change things, and restores reality to something like its old flawed self.‘I have never written a plot-driven novel,’ Le Guin said. ‘I admire plot from a vast distance, with unenvious admiration. I don’t do it; never did it; don’t want to; can’t.’ She tended to write stories which include long journeys that loop back ...”

“... frozen routines and discourses needing ludic disassembly. These plays run the gamut of the self-conscious genres, from Paid on Both Sides (subtitled ‘A Charade’) and Enemies of a Bishop (‘A Morality in Four Acts’) through to the most portentously earnest and last of the plays, On the Frontier (1938), which as if in an act of final disowning is ...”

“... who had no claim to it. Of course he doesn’t himself make this point; he must have thought it self-evident. To talk thus may be thought fuddy-duddy, but the question is not about manners, which have changed in matters of this kind, but about truth, or at any rate about accuracy. ‘Morgan’ gives a false impression of the relationship between the ...”

“... stub of a piton hammered in by the first person to tread this way thirty years before), and with self-images. On a climb that frightens me my self feels to myself like an overheated cave; doubts of my adequacy flicker and dart like a maddened bat; not until this uncontrollable soot-black monster deigns to retreat into the ...”

“... may be less contentiously characterised as the belief that the capabilities and the demands of the self are disproportionate to its circumstances,’ The reason this agreeable solution to the problem of solidarity is so hard to attain and maintain is precisely the friction between our public and private lives. ‘To obtain the means for our material support we ...”

“... a particularly serious publisher of poetry. Appearing there did nothing to contradict Bishop’s self-stylisation as a ‘poet by default’: ‘I’ve always felt that I’ve written poetry more by not writing it than writing it.’ In a generation at worst of noise-makers and grimly professional professionals – ‘Les Maudits: the compliment/ each ...”

“... persistence, or endurance of spirit, and to a passion for descriptive specificity when it comes to self-adornment: what some call style. Cunningham, who died in 2016 at 87, was celebrated for the weekly photo essays he published for decades in the New York Times: ‘On the Street’ was an exquisite exercise in public pattern recognition, and ‘Evening ...”

“... to the glories of diction not the mysteries of charisma, the discipline of repertory not the self-immolation of the single performance. He directed and lectured, recorded albums of Shakespeare, did films, television; but the English stage was Gielgud’s echo-chamber for seventy years, and he is centrally responsible for the English sense of a national ...”

“... he will never be entirely dead. In family histories such simple pleasures can easily turn to self-congratulation – the kind, for instance, that led to the male Stracheys’ smug sense that ‘the Stracheys are most strongly the children of their fathers, not their mothers … it does not matter whom they marry, the type continues and has been much the ...”

“... broadly than almost anyone working in the Marxist tradition ever has’: since labour is an act of self-realisation, however alienated under capitalism, individuals are evaluated on the basis of their actions. What is of value in any society, whatever the mode of production, will be judged according to the imaginative and ethical principles guiding communal ...”

“... to the Enlightenment, and to do with new emphases placed on individual experience and ‘the Self’. To do with walking in high places, with sudden, untranslatable visions, with the Infinite. The problems of the Enlightenment may be unanswerable, beyond certain remarks about secularism and the march of Reason, but the siting of Romanticism is no less ...”

“... Labour Party but the whole Ukanian notion of ‘class’, which here denotes a sort of lumpish, self-encapsulating and self-perpetuating corporatism: knowing-one’s-place erected into social theory and a servile national identity. Less a nation of shopkeepers than of butlers – the most that can be said of a true ...”

“... instruct us not to assume that what a writer says is simple autobiography. If you’ve got to have self-referential fiction, you might as well have it in the form of Dennis Potter announcing his death on his chosen medium and going on to describe his imminent posthumous work about the dissemination of a dead writer’s memories via a TV hook-up between pickled ...”