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“... Lionel Trilling wrote in his journal of his ‘intense disgust with my official and public self’. One of the attractions of this language, if you can bear the tension, is that people can talk about unhappiness; and denial, even while fully in place as denial, can be elaborately discussed. The word ‘fear’ runs through Robins’s book like an ...”

“... ancient sources contradict one another on the details of his downfall, but it is immortalised in Robert Graves’s I, Claudius in which Sejanus (a young Patrick Stewart in the BBC adaption) is presented by his successor, Macro, with the letter ordering his summary execution and the butchery of all his family. After seven years at the apex of power, Macro was ...”

“... Fort’s very British mind – Eton and BalIiol – doesn’t wander easily to excavations of the self but rather to ruminations about history and class. ‘I like to picture Prior More of Worcester on a fine summer’s morning in, say, 1521,’ he writes, as he sets off on his bike to find the original commissioned ponds, a botched journey which nonetheless ...”

“... female Thucydides’, though when she attacked his late father, the former prime minister Robert Walpole, he backtracked, deciding she was a ‘foolish’ nihilist, ‘levelling all for no end or purpose’. Her writings on female education influenced Mary Wollstonecraft. Understandably, the profile of such a radical figure dimmed at home during the ...”

“... difficulties.As I was reading these letters I also happened to be reading a fine new study by Robert Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the 18th Century.* The book traces the history of the concept of moral beauty from Plato and Plotinus, through Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, and into Kant, Schiller and Goethe. Norton explores the way this ...”

“... English political nation a great deal, but in 1603 the skilful diplomacy of her chief minister, Robert Cecil, escorted James VI, King of Scots, to the thrones of England and Ireland, with far less fuss than everyone had feared. The entire archipelago was for the first time in its history united under a single monarch, and moreover under the ruler of the ...”

“... insists that he and his colleagues ‘always did love … a cinema that is haunted by writing’. Robert Bresson said much the same thing: ‘Cinema is not a spectacle. It’s a kind of writing.’ There is a wonderful, casual-seeming evocation of this thought in Daney’s essay from 1969 on Pasolini’s Teorema. He says we know what the desert at the end of ...”

“... inner world of another person.) Mark Ford is alive to the idiosyncratic nature of Roussel’s ‘self-evident uniqueness’ and ‘unassailable self-referentiality’, just as he is aware of the dangers of seeking to contextualise or even to ‘understand’ Roussel’s work, rendering it less freakish or more explicable ...”

“... largely, if not exclusively, in traditional metre and rhyme schemes, analysands all, and with self-inflating personae that always reminded me of those giant balloons of Mickey Mouse and Pluto associated with Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. They published and reviewed one another in journals like the Nation, Partisan Review, the Kenyon Review and Sewanee ...”

“... he stopped thinking of the universe as somehow ‘spiritual’ in character, as Great Evolving Self. Instead, he started thinking of human selves and human languages as just devices which evolution had recently cobbled together. More important, he stopped thinking of the universe as having an intrinsic nature, as something which one might get right once ...”

“... and a ‘dowdy trollop’. Hazlitt can, and did, look after himself. He was a spiky, awkward, self-absorbed man: total frankness was his forte – ‘I say what I think; I think what I feel.’ Though he was, in the opinion of his friends, ‘substantially insane’ during his three-year infatuation with Sarah, he picked himself off the floor, got married ...”

“... pure form of ‘Stalinism in the East’ goes back to the 1940s, and was constantly reinforced by Robert Scalapino, a Cold War scholar who came to prominence in the late 1950s. North Korea was indeed Stalinist in its state-run industrialisation drive, and modelled its administration and much of its system on Stalin’s Russia – but so did every other ...”

“... David Harvey’s Limits to Capital (1982), Giovanni Arrighi’s Long 20th Century (1994) and Robert Brenner’s Economics of Global Turbulence (2006), all expressly concerned with the grinding tectonics and punctual quakes of capitalist crisis. Yet little trace of this literature, by Marx or his successors, has surfaced even among the more open-minded ...”

“... makes the scene even more touching. 6 February. I am reading a history of the Yorkshire Dales by Robert White, one of a series, Landscape through Time, published by English Heritage. During the enclosures of the 18th and 19th centuries, most of the land enclosed was added to existing farms, but in 1809 John Hulton used the land allotted to him from the ...”

“... that his ‘thisness tiptoes on Might-Not-Have-Been!’ and writes: ‘All my life/I felt my self’s lack of necessity.’ His best short story, ‘In Dreams Begin Responsibilities’, is set in a movie theatre where the narrator watches on, helpless, as his father proposes to his mother on screen. ‘Don’t do it,’ the boy pleads. ‘It’s not too ...”