“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... its centre of vision the top-hatted head of the man strolling towards the viewer (believed to be a self-portrait), while the other, focused on that deliberately enlarged diamond shape, has as its centre of vision the head of the blue-smocked worker leaning on the parapet of the bridge. Caillebotte’s other lopsided pictures were called ...”

“... more and more the truth of Vietnam is in the nearby countries ... I don’t have the wonderful self-confidence of Isaiah – ‘I’m a terrific domino man’ – but I share the feeling that’s where we have done best.There were fainthearts, of course, as there always are when great enterprises of the will are afoot. As an ever-increasing number even of ...”

“... which soon I shall turn into a pen again – brilliantly negligent, diligent, inside all this self truly formless – I hear the laughter of the irrigation ditch I’ve made, I see the dry field blonde-up and green, day smacks its lips, they are back, the inventors, they are going to do it again, sprinkle-seed, joker rain coming to loosen it all. How ...”

“... batted together the parts of the sycamore stick she had broken in two and then made of them the self-important capital letter T – and she spun one.     She rolled the stick over her thumb and then she tried for greater twirling speed, as she sat on the park bench that bore a personalised inscribed plaque dedicated to MY DEAREST NANCY.     She is not ...”

“... of, Everything accumulated ever As I took squarings from the tops of bridges Or the banks of self at evening. Lick of fear. Sweet transience. Flirt and splash. Crumpled flow the sky-dipped willows trailed in. All gone into the world of light? Perhaps As we read the line sheer forms do crowd The starry vestibule. Otherwise They do not. What lucency ...”

“... writ would be people he wouldn't mind meeting. At the time, I was kneeling on the floor with a self-assembly bookshelves kit, wondering why they'd given me only nine nuts for ten bolts, and just when he'd said that, about the two churches, I realised that the alarm bell on the used-car garage which had been ringing since Friday night had stopped. For the ...”

“... and now it hangs, Hangs for dear life onto its fine brown ghost. Clinging exhausted to its former self, Its head flung back as if to watch the moon, The blue-green veins pulsing along its wing, The thing unwraps itself, but falls too soon. The ants are tiny and their work is swift – The insect-shark is washed up on their land – While the sea sounds ...”

“... The Grief Maps You find the manuals (‘How to Mourn’) on Borders’ Self-Help shelves. ‘Imagine this to be your Trail Guide in a park. Starting from Point Death, the paths available are Numbness, Shock, Denial. They lead to Loneliness, Confusion; visions of black lorries dashing by on the M25 each with a hole in its black side like the last piece missing from a jigsaw: sable icebergs calving in the Sea of Desolation ...”

“... the heart branches with its                     wild arteries – I own my self, I own my leaving – the falcon watching from the tree – I shall torch the crop that no one else                     have it whispers the air – & someone’s swinging from a rope, his rope – the eye ...”

“... or rather it was moving that no one thought about. We were each happy in the round cell of our self-determination, attentively falling out of love with the atrium of tomorrow, its muscle, its derring-do. The Situation Upstairs Like a forest fire in a jungle with no one to watch it, this sea breeze releases me to the cloud of knowing. There are beaters in ...”

“... letters make clear how far from reality both the public perception and to some extent the private, self-deprecating persona were. For one thing Fitzgerald was clearly a writer all her life: her correspondence from the beginning was a playground, and at times perhaps a refuge, in which she created characters and drew a narrative thread through the random events ...”