“... two-hour battle with the ‘slave breaker’ Edward Covey as the most significant example of his self-mythologising. On Covey’s dilapidated farmstead, Blight writes, ‘Ishmael found his Ahab, the ultimate tyrant whose obsessions could never be tamed.’ But in trying to break the slave, Covey himself was broken. ‘I felt as I never felt ...”

“... the third category, although I understand it very soberly, without a shadow of sentimentality or self-pity . . . To be homeless . . . means only that the person having this defect cannot indicate the streets, cities or community that might be his home, his, as one is wont to say, miniature homeland. It is this ...”

“... in the Fifties. But today, more than 65 years after it was created, the humour seems trite and self-consciously cute, although this may be due to the current preference for technique over subtlety. Les Masques(1933) was the first ballet to incorporate what became known as the ‘Fred Step’ (a combination of five steps which he credited to Pavlova). It ...”

“... on whom he experimented for meagre payments). In fact, the myth of Hunter’s self-inoculation was scotched by George Quist in a 1979 paper. The story, designed to fit the image of the inhuman experimentalist, was fabricated by a pupil of Hunter’s, Jesse Foot, who had become a disgruntled rival. One of Hunter’s biographers wants to ...”

“... the most haunting stories in the book is that of the Tierra del Fuegian boy kidnapped by Captain Robert Fitzroy, Chief Officer of HMS Beagle, in 1830. The boy was given a name by the crew – Jemmy Button – and taken to London, where he ‘saw a stone lion on the steps of Northumberland House, and settled down to a boarding-school at Walthamstow’. On the ...”

“... of Eden belonged to the tragedy of the peasantry in the 19th century. The family farm in Wyre was self-sufficient, they ate bannocks, butter, cheese and milk made by themselves from their own fields and their own animals, they sent the wool from their own sheep to a Border town to be made up into clothes, and they ate so much crab and lobster from the sea ...”

“... example, she says more than once that Hemingway proved to be a better writer about the war than Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon, even though they saw a lot more fighting than he did, precisely because he was not, as they were, hampered by a literary education and training in ‘conventional strategies of expression’. A similar point is made about the ...”

“... artistic canons merely disguised the simple fact that they weren’t very important to anyone’s self-fashioning. By the late 1990s the humanities appeared marginal even to the universities, driven as they were by Federal grants and corporate connections to the sciences. Moreover, in the wake of the ‘new economy’, pundits began to wonder what the ...”

“... British politics, is in reality ‘another chapter of decline and fall, accompanied by ever wilder self-deceptions which are really compensations for a certain inescapable and shameful weakness of state’. Donald Dewar finds Nairn’s antithetical habit of mind infuriating (as in ‘Youthism is not a bad term for the resultant terminal condition: a strategy ...”

“... and sometimes malevolent publications against the grievances of the innocent and the weak. Self-regulation, as its apologists call it, is not of course peculiar to newspapers. Doctors and lawyers discovered its attractions long ago, and anyone who buys a new house with crumbling brickwork or a leaking roof soon finds out that the National ...”

“... are being addressed in a new edition. The book begins with a prologue describing the magnificently self-congratulatory dinner held to celebrate completion of the original OED in Goldsmiths’ Hall on 6 June 1928. This was Derby Day, which allows Winchester to describe the social scene and to opine: ‘A great horse race on a sunny afternoon tends always to ...”

“... artifice that can be entered only after things have broken down. They are, in short, as self-propelling and potentially dangerous as the sexual fantasies of The Fermata. The Fermata lost Baker a number of fans (‘Goodbye Nicholson Baker, goodbye for ever,’ Victoria Glendinning said). He has been scrambling ever since to recover his accreditation ...”

“... Messiaen’s goal, exactly: he wrote music to praise God, not to proselytise. Nonetheless, as Robert Sholl argues in his ‘critical biography’, it’s not easy to disentangle Messiaen’s art from his belief that in composing he was ‘making a transcendent God empirical and sensate’. The music, Sholl suggests, allows ‘believers and non-believers ...”

“... own son, John, who also became an adept fiddler, like his grandfather. Clare felt an affinity with Robert Burns, collected songs as Burns did, and during his asylum years wrote a number of songs in the Scottish vernacular. Clare says in his autobiography that both his parents were ‘illiterate to the last degree’. Concerned to dispel the myths, Bate points ...”

“... have cribbed from: ‘The creative energy of patriarchy is fast running out; what remains is its self-generating energy for destruction.’ ‘“Identity” became a synonym for “safe space” in which alikeness rather than difference could be explored.’ Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about Billie Holiday, ‘Songs for a Coloured Singer’, is called out ...”