“... does not seem to be a passing fad. The scandal-maker of the 1930s became, by a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, part of the saving remnant on which the future of reading would depend. The photo on the cover of Denys Thompson’s The Leavises shows him in a jacket impermeable to the insults of time and with the open shirt of a Labour leader. He ...”

“... On receipt of a first draft of what would end up as Canto II, the one that begins ‘Hang it all, Robert Browning’, Homer records that reading it made him feel ‘like one going up in an Airship – The Mechanician has honoured me with a seat – and we are soon up in the pure azure – Time and space are nothing.’ He modestly declares his opinion of ...”

“... had shrunk to the darkened upstairs room in 50 Wimpole Street from which she would elope with Robert Browning. Her letters to him allude to the ‘blind hopes’ for the future that Prometheus speaks of in Aeschylus. She hoped to escape her isolation, not just to marry, but to realise her creative potential. She did not want to be crushed by a falling ...”

“... he wrote to Hanns Skolle, a painter whom he had befriended in the Library in New York. ‘My self-analysis is becoming self-laceration; my failures call for such ardent criticism (and get it) that I am in a fair way . . . to what?’ He returned to the United States a few months later, and tried again to write. The ...”

“... sanity with one of his friends leading to Nietzsche’s hospitalisation in 1889. Burckhardt’s self-deprecation may not always have been in earnest, but he was modest enough to see that the philosopher’s effusiveness had crossed a line. ‘There is nothing in the world I fear more,’ he wrote, ‘than being overestimated.’ Reading Greek Cultural ...”

“... are never curst but when they are hungry.’Shakespeare took his play from a novella by Robert Greene called Pandosto: or, The Triumph of Time. That subtitle may have been one of the things which mainly interested the dramatist in it, the other being the incestuous plot situation that drives its royal hero to his final suicide: when his lost child ...”

“... Donald Trump, whose narcissistic exhibitionism offered a never-ending source of unintentional self-satire. ‘Who’s my toughest competitor – if not in content, only in style?’ he asked. ‘Prince Charles,’ he answered. ‘I’m thinking of becoming an entertainer,’ he also said. ‘Liza Minnelli gets $75,000 a night to sing, and I’m really ...”

“... broader philosophical and political purposes it will hardly do to appeal to women’s discourse or self-consciousness. Yet various papers both in Women and Moral Theory and in Feminist Perspectives in Philosophy (an entirely British volume published in the US) urge us to start our thinking by considering women’s point of view. No doubt women’s experience ...”

“... smoke, but would instead fatten the worms which feed the birds which keep the London cats sleek, self-satisfied and asleep for 18 hours a day. While the other Jenny went off to spend the holiday weekend in Bradford (which gave more pause for thought about spending eternity in such eccentric company), I hunkered down with my Gazetteer to apprise myself of the ...”

“... mixture of excitable populism and authoritarianism, the latter copied from his revered mentor, Sir Robert Peel, whose ‘Canute-like executive arrogance’ had wrought so much damage in the 1840s. In this account Gladstone emerges as a half-crazed genius, who, unexpectedly elected as master of the college, had then gone on to write a weekly column for the ...”

“... young man with whom Cheever had an affair at the end of his life, makes it sound like a comedy of self-delusion. ‘Have you ever had a homosexual experience?’ Susan Cheever asked her father, in an interview which was published by Newsweek. ‘My answer to that is, well, I have had many, Susie, and all between the ages of nine and eleven,’ Cheever ...”

“... undeniably middle-class, and this unhappy accident of birth occasionally induced in him bouts of self-contempt. That this portrait of him should be so enormously detailed testifies to the author’s confidence that a reasonably large readership will be fascinated by the whims, fantasies and extravagances which spread like Alpine plants over the rock-like ...”

“... am I neglected? is he/she overrated? – they would quickly decline into paranoia. When Robert Frost died, John Berryman’s first response was It’s scary. Who’s Number One? Who’s Number One? Cal’s Number One, isn’t he? – which at least has the virtue of transparency. But as we modestly (and necessarily) insist that we’re just ...”

“... when the hapless consort’s hairline started to recede or his ardour flag. This is the version Robert Graves gives in his Greek Myths, and though Graves’s anthropology is just as shaky as J.G. Frazer’s, I love the poetic truth at the kernel of it. Certainly the question ‘Who is your father?’ only becomes pressing when property is inherited through ...”

“... one is ever simply himself but is always compounded of other people.’ For Beddoes the self was a graveyard, and his own was cluttered with the bodies of Keats and Shelley, Marlowe and Webster. Writing tragic drama legitimised his desire to resurrect the dead and dissect them. So it is not the tone of weary resignation in his suicide note which ...”