“... Abraham Lincoln​ , memorialised as a child of the frontier, self-made man and liberator of the slaves, has been the subject of more than 16,000 books, according to David S. Reynolds’s new biography, Abe. That’s around two a week, on average, since the end of the American Civil War. Almost every possible Lincoln can be found in the historical literature, including the moralist who hated slavery, the pragmatic politician driven solely by ambition, the tyrant who ran roughshod over the Constitution, and the indecisive leader buffeted by events he could not control ...”

“... She was influenced by the work of Walter Pater, and by her friendships with Henry James, Robert Browning and John Singer Sargent. But she was never swayed to the extent that she relinquished her intellectual independence. An atheist and materialist, she had no time for contemporary flirtations with the occult. In 1885 she attended a meeting of the ...”

“... pit bulls, twin heads wobbling in the window. Gold chains, leather hats: pumped to the limits of self-parody, the bosses in their glitzed company limo look like snuff-film extras. The wretched Alsatian slinks off to sniff at cigarette packets and to pee on a few steps. In the old days, apparently, around 1985, the drugs were carried inside the collars of the ...”

“... foreign clerics were only too pleased to work inside the royal fold, where their distinction was self-evident. It also gave grounds for the aggrandising notion that philosophers supplied kings with wisdom – as Aristotle had Alexander.The​ second half of the 15th century was dominated by Ripley, the canon of an Augustinian priory in Yorkshire, whose ...”

“... in wilful collective hallucination, the abbey and its visitors mostly ignore them. As Robert Musil said, writing before BLM, ‘there is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.’ The abbey’s audio guide – the English version is mellifluously narrated by Jeremy Irons – mentions them only in brief asides about Poets’ Corner and a ...”

“... family life could mesh with a fear that creation itself was in such jeopardy that any attempt at self-expression – whether in art, politics or religion – was irrelevant and even fatuous. You could imagine this dilemma inspiring a perverse comedy (think of Billy Wilder or Paul Thomas Anderson running it, let alone Preston Sturges) in which a respected ...”

“... letters’ in an antique shop in Arezzo. Whether 19th-century or 21st, the tale has echoes of Robert Browning’s discovery in Florence in June 1860, at the market in the Piazza di San Lorenzo, of a collection of documents relating to a Roman murder case from 1698. ‘The old yellow book’, as Browning came to refer to it, formed the basis of his ...”

“... of vision’. They remind us we’re watching a ‘mediated form of seeing’.The self-referentiality of A Matter of Life and Death anticipates The Red Shoes, with its reflection on the process (and the psychological cost) of making art and cinema. Like its predecessor, the film has two contrasting modes of representation. A fantasy ballet ...”

“... speaker writes home to his mother about his brother’s arrest. Poetry satisfied the ‘need for self-expression at a formative period of my life’. But politics came with it: Johnson joined the British Black Panther Party while still at school, and was introduced to Black consciousness literature for the first time: W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black ...”

“... of socialist realism. Then came news of the Stalin trials and purges. Exercising a great deal of self-deception, some Surrealists, including Aragon, remained party members. Most of the others left; the proud Breton was further alienated when he was refused a speaking slot at the International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture in 1935. A chief ...”

“... That could only be done when men reformed themselves to do their duty to God, to neighbour and to self. More’s arguments, heavily salted with abuse after the manner of the time, are couched in Latin, so as to contain the dispute among those who could read that language: ‘Quid respondet frater, pater, potator?’ What answer from this crapulous father ...”

“... also inspired two of the true jewels and masterworks of science fiction’s ‘Golden Age’ – Robert A. Heinlein’s stories ‘By His Bootstraps’ (1941) and ‘All You Zombies’ (1959) – may be less well known. In these stories the protagonist, travelling into the past (and having to do so repeatedly in order to try to correct the damage wreaked by ...”

“... must have written it. ‘The autistic mind, it was supposed at that time, was incapable of self-understanding and understanding others and therefore of authentic introspection and retrospection,’ Sacks wrote. ‘How could an autistic person write an autobiography? It seemed a contradiction in terms.’ As late as 2001, the epidemiologist Walter ...”

“... of a dissolute father and an unstable mother, he was born with a club foot, which always made him self-conscious,’ he says of Byron; and of Dickinson, no less winningly: ‘She was reclusive, tended to wear white clothing, which was thought odd, and scarcely left her bedroom in her later years.’ Such things strike a whimsical note, but usually Carey’s ...”

“... of the 19th century and as far from a good Samaritan as anyone could imagine. Restell was a self-publicist on an epic scale who was said to possess an ‘inordinate greed for money’. She marketed herself as an exotic Frenchwoman with decades of training in women’s medicine when she was really a seamstress from a small town in the Cotswolds who never ...”