“... Autobiography of Alice B. as a crucial document in the history of Modernist fashioning and self-fashioning – the story of Axel’s tower or Babel’s, told in the first person. It should also make us think yet again about the legacy of cultural Modernism – and about its relationship to the larger fate of Europe in mid-century. The Man from ...”

“... Geller had given him a mind-expanding reading list of what we would now recognise as New Age self-help books. Elvis had read them all, performed all the meditations, but didn’t feel the light, not in mind, body or soul. The fire refused to descend; his spiritual air remained a vacuum. Now, on the plush customised tour bus, Geller was thrown by how ...”

“... women, felt driven to sketch his extraordinary personality. Koestler himself wrote several mordant self-analyses. Scammell from time to time interjects his own ideas on what – his neglectful mother, his inner conflict over his Jewishness in anti-semitic Central Europe – made Koestler so pugnacious, so insufferably competitive, so tyrannical and ruthless ...”

“... precocity here takes a cultural form that was central to Spender’s own habitual confidence or self-importance. And the second is that, as a writer, Spender was, as he sometimes acknowledged, a constant autobiographer. In World within World, his first formal autobiography, published when he was only 42, he contrasted himself with those of his poetical ...”

“... designs or marketing. Seeking a change of publisher was less like a fresh start than a sort of self-sabotage, since it risked the new book being separated from his back catalogue, especially damaging in the case of a trilogy. The Information was published by Flamingo in 1995, but Amis was back with Cape for Night Train in 1997 and has stayed there ...”

“... was, however, an epoch of unprecedented epoch-mania. Nothing was allowed to be its own individual self; everything had to be interpreted in terms of what was typical for its time. A handful of nit-picking philosophers and pukka historians may have frowned their disapproval, but why should anyone care as long as the trade in periods and period styles was ...”

“... Dowland and Purcell, with a small debt to odd contemporaries like Kevin Ayers, Syd Barrett, Robert Wyatt.In​ Germany in the mid-1970s, Eno hung out with the Cologne experimentalists Can and collaborated with Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius (aka Cluster, aka Harmonia). Not long after Another Green World was released he was in Germany and ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to the trouble of finding and reproducing an ‘extremely rare’ and unkind caricature of him by Robert Dighton as ‘the Macaroni Painter’. Northcote later claimed that Maria ‘always despised’ Cosway. That would seem to be an exaggeration, but it was, if not exactly a marriage of convenience, certainly a convenient marriage. He was in love; she was ...”

“... 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 ...”