“... early religious feeling made him ‘rest in the thought of two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’. Spark’s heroine loves the passage, but also feels ‘a revulsion against an awful madness I then discerned in it’. That awful madness within the love of God, and the correspondingly awful madness that potentially ...”

“... the legend. He did the first in the usual, recognisably Victorian way, from scratch, with terrific self-confidence, huge energy, astute focus and ferocious determination. He did the second by exploiting a singular gift for self-publicity: introduce a journalist and Edison would produce a soundbite. Some of them slid straight ...”

“... of distinct ideological and quasi-religious purpose, more aware of his limitations and his lack of self-confidence than of the recognition the world awarded. He now appears as a liberal bigot whom no socialist, Christian or conservative could consider non-partisan. Mrs Moorman’s book concentrates on the period before his return to Cambridge as Regius ...”

“... honest to yourself about yourself is good for you – which is I suppose what all narratives about self-realisation must be about. By contrast The Magician, which is not about coming out but about staying firmly in, occupies a much more complicated and neurotic world, in which Mann’s negation of his homosexual feelings is admittedly a kind of moral failure ...”

“... to appear in Blast. Lewis thought that people had had enough of all that. They did not want self-effacement. They wanted brilliant fellows like him performing stunts and letting off fireworks. ‘What’s the good of being an author if you don’t get any fun out of it?’ Ford told this story several times in several different ways, each time effacing ...”

“... to leave behind: murder, intoxication, libertinage, art and revolution are sublime forms of self-expression. At the head of this parade is the rogue poet François Villon, imprisoned in the Châtelet in 1462; on the last float, the heroines from Jacques Rivette’s 1981 movie, Le Pont du Nord, are waving goodbye, along with the two keynote ...”

“... discarded – and so should the assorted defeats and dead ends derived from it. This year’s The Self Awakened tries to help the left further down the road, and no doubt Free Trade Reimagined, due soon, will be another phase of his unstoppable campaign. Unger speaks primarily about the left and what it should do, but the old right finds itself in a ...”

“... that was it. A stock vision of undergraduates then (gleaned from movies like A Yank at Oxford with Robert Taylor) was of a young man in dressing-gown and slippers, a towel round his neck en route for the distant baths. I didn’t run to a dressing-gown and slippers either: ‘Nobody’ll mind if you just wear your raincoat,’ my mother reassuringly said. I ...”

“... victims of Western standards of humanity.’ Editing the piece for the New York Review of Books, Robert Silvers objected to the unqualified critique of Western capitalism: ‘Won’t you keep in mind the Western reader who might not want to cross the slag heaps with you?’ (She felt he had edited the piece into a ‘mild, unchallenging plea’.) With its ...”

“... which each country is culturally organised and politically structured. In Germany, where no major self-identified gay writer has emerged in the twenty years since the death of Hubert Fichte, gay fiction is considered to be little better than a joke, usually a dirty one; there may or may not be a more pronounced homophobia in Germany than in other European ...”

“... source of a quotation. Smiling, the boy fell dead. Mr Usborne, really! I thought everyone knew Robert Browning’s poem ‘An Incident in the French Camp’. Young lieutenant comes to Napoleon with the news that they have taken Ratisbon. Napoleon quite pleased. He notices that the young man isn’t looking quite himself. ‘You’re ...”

“... in their entirety and prefaced by informative and intelligent essays by eminent scholars (Robert Rosenblum in one case, Theodore Reff in the other). Nowhere else in the exhibition do we encounter the concentration of these sheets from the 1916 sketchbook, except perhaps in the near-abstract Cubist drawings in a sketchbook of 1918. But severe ...”

“... to Moscow in sanitised form in order to ingratiate itself with the Soviet Union). The late Robert Maxwell, the publisher, and Nicholas Davies, the former foreign editor of the Daily Mirror, have inconsequential British bit parts in the saga as told by Hersh. But Maxwell’s Jewish origins, his escape from the holocaust, his identification with Israel ...”

“... example to enthusiastic religious groups, or to wayward individuals, served certain purposes. That Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy was, as Johnson thought, magisterial, and unread. Above all, that madness was proximate to Reason, indeed twinned to the idea of ‘Reason’, and that madness was the secret history of the Enlightenment, its exhausted ...”

“... back to the poet, as Edward Thomas’s strange excitements would refer them: the absence of self is the real offering in Blunden’s poems. Like Ralph Hodgson, whom he knew well in Japan, he suffers from anthologies, and his poetry is best browsed through. He made great friends with Adrian Bell, the country novelist who wrote Corduroy and became the ...”