“... strict Reichians, pornography fostered masturbation, which locked the individual in a self-reinforcing loop of diminishing returns.) Tynan experiences an epiphany at a live show in Hamburg, where he, wife Kathleen and another couple spend a lovely evening watching a young ‘mutually affectionate’ couple copulate on stage. For some obscure ...”

“... reading a biography so utterly abstemious in critique and evaluation, so wary of the minor self-aggrandisements that accompany the biographer’s possession of and by his or her subject. Most biographies amount to a celebration of the triumph of mind over matter. This one opens not beside the cradle, or at the distant root of some genealogical ...”

“... It is your birthright.’ To me, Elvis was a delirium; to Bruce, he was a destiny. Bruce was a self-proclaimed Greaser whom rock’s renegade energy flushed out into the open and legitimised on the American scene. Greasers, he writes, ‘were the kids destined to live the decent hardworking lives of their parents … the future farmers, homemakers and baby ...”

“... surprise, she enjoyed the exercise. ‘The Midtown … made me looser,’ she said. Singing was self-defining: it allowed Simone increasingly to speak from her black experience, not from the white milieu of classical music. ‘I didn’t know I could improvise like that,’ she said. ‘All the time I was practising. I’d practise Bach and Beethoven and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the PLO which would insist on the national rights of the Palestinian people as well as Palestinian self-determination. Vance said that the US would immediately recognise the PLO and inaugurate negotiations between it and Israel. Arafat categorically turned the offer down, as he did similar offers. Then the Gulf War occurred, and because of the disastrous ...”

“... by his obscene and irrational father, Abraham, could be taken as an analogy for the state of self-imposed tutelage Kant wanted society to escape. Prudently, the Prussian royal censor banned him from writing about religion again.Kant wasn’t the first to find the story troubling. Commentators looked for ambiguity in God’s command – did he really mean ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and over is what makes a style distinctive, but it also leaves a writer vulnerable to parody, or self-parody. Parker homes in on the mannerisms that characterise ‘mezzo-Hemingways’ and Woolf’s ‘weaker sisters’, while May Sinclair is chastised for turning out books ‘with one hand tied behind her and a buttered crumpet in the other’. The one ...”

“... and bustle that you claim to want in the young. I am visible but not heard: distracted and nearly self- sufficient introverts, I and mine never meant any trouble. We hide our eggs; we work the third shift half the time, and give your cleaners the harmless slip even before they know it … But now I think I’ve figured out what bugs you. We have seen you ...”

“... I left the protectionof my plan & mythinking. I let my selfgo. Is this hope Ithought. Light fled.We have a worldto lose I thought.Summer fled. Thewaters rose. How do I organisemyself now. How do Ifind sufficientignorance. How do Inot summariseanything. Is this mystery,this deceptively complexlack of design. No sumtowards which to strive. No general truth ...”

“... municipal baths in another town and glance across the blue-grey of the park to where the better self I meant to be glides quietly, length by length, to his own ...”

“... the Lady’s Tower aren’t quite rare enough to acquire significant market value, much like the self-taught experts in autobrecciation and exfoliation weathering who work their way to the surface of the Coastal Path at the close of a hard winter. Amateur geologists, rockhounds, and collectors may be distinguished by commitments to task-specific ...”

“... rules of newspaper publishing. The Magazine’s reputation on the newspaper for being frivolous, self-absorbed, anarchic, using acres of space on what appeared to be self-indulgence and money-wasting, revolved around Francis, the éminence grise. When Don McCullin and I came back from Vietnam in 1972, McCullin’s pictures ...”