“... become a happy person, or a good painter, if I stayed.’ She bought a lynx stole and painted a self-portrait with it slung over her shoulders: she looks haughty, glamorous, free. At the time of the move, she thought she might be pregnant and wrote to a friend that ‘a kind of strange, calm “can’t be bothered” is growing in me, with a strong sense of ...”

“... countrymen, who seemed to have a talent for revolution but no corresponding talent for self-government; more broadly, its target was every anxious liberal who sympathised with the political and economic aspirations of the less favoured members of society, but feared their predilection for dictators, every liberal whose instincts were ...”

“... of disciples in the Lower Fourth, the really superior person, not saint, not sage, but outcast, self-abandoned. Waugh had the same school-world dreams in social form, and they continue to exercise a fascination – crude, perhaps, but potent. His popularity shows, among other things, how those with the instinct to opt out have a keen relish for opting in at ...”

“... it be done handsomely, they would turn them all from Females into Males; so great is grown the self-conceit of the Masculine, and the disregard of the Female Sex.’ Bacon, Descartes, Locke and Newton all rejected allegory and the personification of the mind or the soul. In science the ‘feminine’ was excised from the imagined process of ...”

“... oddly complementary to Haydon’s: but what she found was salvation rather than martyrdom through self-mythologising in art. She was a woman for whom some form of public representation was inescapable and her disfigurement by smallpox – a great blow, thought contemporaries, to her husband’s career – made her painted image particularly difficult and ...”

“... to the ‘ugly’ parts of the personality as the ones she least likes. By being carefully but not self-consciously written, her book manages to make a kind of common sense – masochism, for example, is ‘making the best of a bad job’; ‘a percentage of good manners is knowing what to do with one’s body in public’ – and yet in the shrewd lucidity of ...”

“... know (and note how carefully all five of the senses are brought into it). But it is also an act of self-definition, MacNeice claiming a role for himself, the Poet as Ordinary Bloke. The particulars in the Zoo passage sound ordinary enough, but the telling of them is highly poetical, from the allusion to Hopkins’s sonnet at the beginning to the swirl of ...”

“... the left apparently come round to these Liberal causes? The cynic would, no doubt, allege blatant self-interest. Losing any hope that Labour can possibly win the next election on our existing electoral system, the Left have now come to see that PR is their only way of returning a Labour government to power. This cynical view would also explain the glaring ...”

“... Mead’ is coming to represent: the blunderer into tribal life, dupe of the primitives, the self-dramatiser, spinner of graceless and unlikely theories. Another version of the anthropologist is the philosopher of culture and society in all its variations, one who understands humanity in some broad, if rather intuitive and dreamy way: Ruth ...”

“... also a risky, flamboyant, long-sustained star performance, complete with pratfalls and buffoonery, self-mockery and self-castigation. Anything she dishes out she is more than ready to take; and as a performer, she has never shirked making an idiot of herself, or washing bloody knickers in public. The querulous critic can be ...”

“... Capet’. It was a literary event in another sense, too. Controversialists on every side tried self-consciously to attain a rhetorical pitch appropriate to their commitment. Burke, Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, as much as Brissot, Danton and Robespierre, tried to seize the stylistic initiative as much as the political initiative, or more accurately as ...”

“... their lot with the Somoza dynasty, something never mentioned in the euphoria over the triumph of a self-styled liberal over a hazy Marxist in a freely-contested election. From the Sandinista point of view, the return of the Chamorros to power could not have seemed so very different from the return of the Somozas. When outsiders manage to seize power, their ...”

“... arty thriller appears to be using his counterpart of Messerschmidt to expound: the mystery of self – that human identity is radically unstable and not to be located, if it exists at all; and the madness of art – that, as the 1988 note in this paper uncontroversially put it, ‘madness combined with creativity is comparatively common among ...”

“... whole thing was thrown back in their face: sacked for being too competent, ignored for being too self-effacing, poorer for being too parsimonious, or merely alive and jobless for not taking enough drugs to ensure the best career move of all. Alone, experienced (the titles say it all), the patient bass players are the ones who eventually knuckle down to the ...”

“... living as a reviewer and journalist. In these final years, scarred by drunkenness, sickness and self-hatred, Stafford’s chief pleasure seemed to be venomous attacks on the absurdities of what she sneeringly called ‘Fem Lib’. She despised the feminist in herself, the suspicion that growing up female in 20th-century America had anything to do with her ...”