“... without his usual manner, bewildered and defensive. Even while she was still alive he had written self-exculpatingly: ‘I expressed myself clumsily to Miss Woolson in appearing to intimate that I was coming there to “live”.’ It was necessary for James as a writer to ‘live’ in inverted commas, but terrible accidents occurred. Reading through this ...”

“... at some point he slipped from seeming younger to seeming older than everyone around him. He was a self-taught modernist with an allegiance to medieval romance and Celtic art, a Londoner who was out of place in London, a Welshman who didn’t speak Welsh. He was an artist who constructed images out of words – in his painted inscriptions – and whose poems ...”

“... of the gods, daring to ask the one forbidden question, the renunciation of love for power, genital self-mutilation as the price of magic: Wagner’s work is everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits reached and exceeded. ‘Wagnerian’ has passed into our language as a byword for the exorbitant, the over-scaled and the ...”

“... a solution to the problem of having a shameful identity that lurked in the deepest recesses of the self. This idea of knowing two things at the same time has been essential to gay people in other ways. Gay people have known that our sexuality was actually, despite what we read or were told, quite normal, quite natural; it was only the world that thought ...”

“... puts it, and there were three more children. The True Confession, by turns grand and grandiose, self-accusing and self-regarding, serious and punning, was essentially a poetical goodbye letter. What can one say of Elizabeth Smart more than that she loved a poet who by the conventional standards they both rejected treated ...”

“... of the country for his pains, returning only after 27 years’ exile and living out his life in self-imposed expiatory silence. It is now nearly impossible, reports Boone, to find copies of his books in libraries: they are removed by traditionalist Mende who feel duty-bound to preserve the secrets of their culture. Reading Our People of the Sierra Leone ...”

“... and could not arouse true love, because ‘one could only worship that which was above one’s self.’ Such foolishness was reinforced by the Dean of New College, whose sermons were poisoned by misogyny. In a sermon delivered during Ned’s second year, the dean said of women: ‘Inferior to us God made you, and inferior to the end you will ...”

“... have been the stronger element, he made his way to England – the year before Ceylon attained self-government – to Nottingham, where he went on to obtain a doctorate in (almost inevitably) the poetry of Lawrence. His first teaching post was in Singapore, the next (I recall reluctantly writing a reference for him) in Belfast, then Sussex, and finally, in ...”

“... a piece of paper seems to have triumphed not only over sedulous corruption but even over simple self-preservation. Whether this or some even more worrying ground of over-confidence was the reason, it looks like another vindication of the cock-up theory of history – a theory which two decades of practice in public and constitutional law have begun to ...”

“... a man to keep the peace and jails him for life for making a mistake in the heat of the action. Our self-important and ineffectual MPs have let this matter lie. Apart from a case argued on BBC Television in favour of the creation of lesser penalties to meet such occasions, the only protest on the subject that I have heard has come from a spokesman in Ulster who ...”

“... debriefing at the hands of MI5. This theory, however, is vulnerable to that deadly comment on all self-justifying testimony – Mandy Rice-Davies’s ‘He would, wouldn’t he?’ Bitov himself has been the most prolific source of conflicting versions of his disappearance in Venice, his appearance in London and his reappearance in Moscow, with each story ...”

“... He enjoys describing his love affairs, but compared with Boswell’s activities these show great self-restraint. He did not have a Dr Johnson to provide sagacious advice about freeing himself from paternal influence. In fact, as those who have seen A Voyage Round My Father on television will realise, this would have been an impossibility, since it is clear ...”

“... and of post Christian humanism is to place at the centre of the imagined universe the thinking and self-conscious animal, this little creature with his Renaissance strut and hard shell of intellectual pride, which shuts him off from immediate responses to the natural order. We need in our imagination to travel far back in time and to reconstruct images of the ...”

“... case, they demonstrate, even at their most hysterical, something different from casting one’s self on a tide of words – especially symbolic epithets like ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘wet’ and ‘cold’ – and trusting to half-remembered cadences out of Shakespeare and Yeats to convey the illusion of meaning. Not the least ardent of Sue Lenier’s ...”

“... however, is remarkable for a style which arches brilliantly between sociological observation and self-delighting irony. This introductory paragraph is emblematic of her technique: Getting a buzz off the stones of Bath, occupying a conspicuous site not fifty yards from the mysterious, chthonic aperture from which the hot springs bubble out of the inner ...”