“... Sending up her closest friends, she cast the arrogant fellow graduate she was in love with as a self-centred cleric, Archdeacon Hoccleve, given to complaining loudly about his wife and numbing his congregation with abstruse sermons. Pym and her sister, Hilary, became Belinda and Harriet Bede, ‘spinsters of fiftyish’, living together in a cottage. While ...”

“... money stock was the one and only thermostat that policymakers required to regulate an effectively self-correcting economy; second, that rules should be introduced, via what Friedman called ‘constitutional provision’, to insulate monetary governance from the temptation to meddle with an economy that was better left to its own devices. If everyone expected ...”

“... of rabbis and licensed moneylenders to the Habsburg emperors, and remained contemptuous of her self-made financier husband. She had been brought up in Vienna, for which, like many similarly placed ladies from the provinces, she yearned throughout her life. To annoy her and as a sign of protest against her attempts to cultivate a Viennese salon in ...”

“... Tell me​ your mystic and I will tell you who you are. The Little Flower, she of the astonishing self-love? Hildegard of Bingen, glowing like rock crystal, or Simone Weil, picking herself like a scab? Teresa of Avila, a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author ...”

“... like the rest.* Maybe. But no other writer in this field so regularly startles one into self-recognition. We skitter anxiously from cradle to grave like a tart between lamp-posts. I won’t make you feel bad so long as you don’t make me feel bad. That is the social contract. And there is nothing much to be done about it. Goffman’s work, as he ...”

“... we begin to suspect Byron of sharing. Yet Byron made a loyal friend, to men at least. The self-absorption conveyed by Byron has been exaggerated by the insistent style of Raphael’s narration and by the one-sidedness of his interests. On Byron’s short-lived and disastrous marriage to Annabella Milbanke, Raphael is in his element, as a ...”

“... a more generous view of Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (1980), or indeed Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, might have yielded a more abundant answer. On the other hand, Freud’s warm if critical admiration of England (which, he shared, incidentally, with members of the Viennese Jockey Club), his remarkable command of ...”

“... under floorboards or digging them into the earth, of concealing the colour of your hair (self-Aryanisation by peroxide), of burying your feelings lest they betray you.Donald’s best friend, Roy Redgrave, discovered that his father kept a loaded .45 service revolver hidden under his bedside table. Roy knew his father as ‘a happy-go-lucky man’, so ...”

“... of her first novel, Wise Blood. Her friend Sally Fitzgerald, the wife of the poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, broke the news, which effectively terminated all dreams of escaping Andalusia, the farm outside Milledgeville run by her mother. There O’Connor spent the last 12 years of her life, raising peacocks and writing ferocious stories populated by ...”

“... uncertainty not really found in the American poets often pervades Apollinaire’s acts of poetic self-naming, even in lines seemingly brimming with confidence: ‘Je lègue à l’avenir l’histoire de Guillaume Apollinaire’ (‘I bequeath to the future the story of Guillaume Apollinaire’). He was not just fatherless but divided in his national identity ...”

“... They were part of the group of artists associated with Horizon that included Graham Sutherland and Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde and very much not, Craxton later insisted, part of the Ayrton-Minton Neo-Romantics. It wasn’t just that he didn’t know the artists personally, and like most people disliked the bombastic ...”

“... walks a tightrope between remote media, genres and historical periods in a chapter that compares Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story ‘The Bottle Imp’ (1891) with David Robert Mitchell’s zombie film It Follows (2014). The former was published a year after the sovereign debt crisis brought about by the insolvency of ...”

“... The estimates for the end of the Thirties ranged from Dallin and Nicolaevsky’s ten million and Robert Conquest’s nine million (the latter figure excluded ‘criminals’) to Wheatcroft’s maximum of four to five million, Jasny’s three and a half million and Timasheff’s two million. Elaborate records in the NKVD archives reveal that about two million ...”

“... the nomenklatura. The system, ‘totalitarianism harnessed to the task of economic growth’, as Robert Campbell described it twenty-five years ago, was considered something of a success around the world until the late Seventies – mainly because of its ability to reconstruct the economy after the war, on the basis of an industrial machine that was already ...”

“... are Laurence Lerner, Cedric Watts, Roger Scruton, John Holloway, Gabriel Josipovici, Wayne Booth, Robert Pattison and Anthony Thorlby. Four of them teach at Sussex, so I suppose the book started as a bright idea in the Senior Common Room at Falmer. Some of the essays are genial performances. Josipovici obviously likes Barthes’s work, and writes happily of ...”