“... reasons and seem to have been less inclined to treasure them for the instruction of posterity. Self-censoring, modest women may even have consigned the lot to the fireplace. Sex was more important than rank in determining epistolary competence in the 17th century. My own research confirms Whyman’s impression that even in the early 18th ...”

“... an unprepossessing child and the elaborate carapace of later years shielded a permanently bruised self-image. In her fifties, while being fêted on a tour in America, she remarked to an acquaintance: ‘I can’t stand myself. I’m so ugly.’ Her father’s attempts to improve her looks with back braces, nose pegs and a strict regime that prevented her from ...”

“... Louis-Auguste Cézanne, a shrewd entrepreneur who became rich through trade and banking, was a self-made man given to scoffing at public opinion. Where Aixois notables read Le Mémorial d’Aix, a local paper that reflected their deep-dyed conservatism, Louis-Auguste professed liberal views and subscribed to L’Evénement, the paper for which Zola wrote ...”

“... rich, beautiful, aristocratic, young – are driven by Sehnsucht and restlessness to pursue self-apotheosis and the meaning of life in exotic lands. Macaulay thought that Byronism was finished by 1830, but in Disraeli it ran much deeper and lasted much longer. His father, a literary antiquarian, had been admired by Byron, and would die in the arms of ...”

“... a narrator with Less than Zero, along with several other characters, a distinctive and highly self-conscious prose style, a time of year, and a milieu of urban self-abuse and disaffection. But there is nothing straightforward about the relationship between the books. I’m glad to have the connection made for ...”

“... and ‘the dilettante tone has charm after the sweeping statements, the safe marble gestures, the self-importance – “I stand with the People and Government of Spain”’ – of Authors Take Sides. Apart from Robert Boyd, the crusaders in Greene’s story were members of the elite, semi-secret society of Cambridge students and graduates known as the ...”

“... your pocket, keep it open. Diminish the haft affix loosely proponent span blood group indexical self-cut. Try doing it now. That final phrase is overtly sarcastic, but not without ambiguity: the urgency of the attempt and its utter impossibility and self-deception are precisely suspended. The stanza as a whole segues even ...”

“... The modern Republican Party was born of revolution. In the early 1960s, right-wing insurgents – self-consciously using the model of Communist cells – took over the GOP, repudiated the moderation of its leaders, among them President Eisenhower and the New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, and built a formidable counter-establishment infrastructure that ...”

“... Like the unconscious, he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. He is the source of our self-determination, not the erasure of it. To be dependent on him, as to be dependent on our friends, is a matter of freedom and fulfilment. Indeed, friendship is the word Aquinas uses to characterise the relation between God and humanity.Dawkins, who is as ...”

“... that inspired Ebenezer Howard and his moral-religious moonshine about rehousing the nation in self-sufficient towns of 30,000 as to be almost fair to him. He digs out the many roots of Howard’s mission, notably its debt to Henry George’s single-tax campaign for land reform, popular in its time, forgotten today. He seems half aware that the garden city ...”

“... taken for granted, he can thank his awesome productivity, which he compares in his autobiography, Self-Consciousness (1989), to his psoriatic over-production of skin, and the sheer availability of his personal life and voice in novels, articles, television appearances and interviews. Though he is an intensely intellectual writer – his early novels undertake ...”

“... fantasists are too solipsistic, these figures are too relentlessly outward-looking for corrective self-scrutiny. Bernard, like Joe, loses the woman he loves, accused by her of being obsessed with rationality at the expense of emotion. McEwan’s first two novels thrived on the contrast between the scrupulous clarity of his writing and the resonant oddness of ...”

“... impulse moved them, that they were chasing a glimpse, however fleeting, of some confirming, self-ratifying idea of beauty, an equation to transcend all equations: some sense of perfect rightness, a feeling of the universe clicking into place. We can clearly see the romantic impulse at work, but when it is expressed through mathematics, most of us are ...”

“... very interestingly, a shift in Milton from an early belief in the plain intelligibility and ‘self-sufficiency’ of scripture to a later belief that scripture requires careful interpretation. With a nod to Derrida, he calls the factor of interpretation a ‘supplement’ and then concludes, with characteristic exaggeration, that respect for scripture as ...”

“... and Guinevere. There are storyettes about knights and foxes, and Paolo and Francesca, and a real self-parody of a framing story about a girl who fakes a set of male genitals with a tulip and two bulbs. There’s a recipe for Salsa di Pomodori (‘Serve on top of fresh spaghetti. Cover with rough new parmesan and cut basil. Raw emotion can be added ...”