“... Spark performs a perpetual disowning and reowning of creaturely and particularly writerly self-loss: to write or to speak is to borrow a power capable of being turned unnervingly against one, and autobiographical connection yields not security of possession but a sense of the uncanny. Spark’s fiction seems not merely to recall her life but – just ...”

“... It was not a ‘harbinger of the downfall of Communist power’, in his view, but a carefully self-limiting revolt which accepted that Communism could not be overthrown. ‘The developments in Poland were a stirring prologue to the narrative of Communism’s collapse, but they remained a sideshow. The real story was elsewhere.’ In other words, not in ...”

“... oil and water. Southern Rhodesia was a white-settler-dominated colony that had enjoyed effective self-government (for the whites) for thirty years. In London it came (nominally) under the Commonwealth Relations Office, which otherwise looked after places like Australia and Canada. Nyasaland and Northern Rhodesia, on the other hand, were ruled by the more ...”

“... with very pale tights’ look like ‘pigs’ trotters’, apparently, but ‘clothes are about self-expression’ so ‘feel free to ignore all of the above.’ The most straightforwardly entertaining parts of the book are those in which Picardie uses her press credentials to enter the dim, gothic world of European high fashion, with its ...”

“... The ‘New York School’ poets’ apparent independence from worldly concerns, their elaborate self-reference and slippery in-jokes, can make the world of the Cedar Tavern seem – in retrospect – a sort of Arcadia in itself. Lehman offers a guided tour. Chapters on Ashbery, O’Hara, Koch (‘our funniest poet … a protean comic genius’) and Schuyler ...”

“... view; it is a live dramatisation of its author’s own doubts. It still feels like a kind of self-testing, with LUI taking the materialism that Diderot espoused as the licence for his own amoral pursuit of appetite, his cynical parisitism and his entertaining satire on the enfeebled ideals of virtue to which MOI still clings. You could say it was a ...”

“... however, seems dispiriting rather than scintillating – dispiriting because it is a chronicle of self-indulgence and sometimes callousness, dispiriting all the more because it is being repeated. It could, to be sure, have been a little less depressing. MacCarthy readily misses opportunities to doubt any of his wife Annabella’s accusations and insinuations ...”

“... death, had to be reprinted four times within the year. Outraged by what he saw as her malice, her self-serving and her inaccuracy, Boswell set instantly to work on his Life of Samuel Johnson, the defects in his own records of Johnson’s conversation supplied by a biographical imagination ‘strongly impregnated with the Johnsonian aether’. Mrs Thrale ...”

“... than anything I could achieve at school with words. There were no excuses, no justifications, no self-deprecations: it was less equivocal, more final. I took for a while to reading about chess, along with stories about musketeers. I killed giants vicariously; I liked the legends. In 1858, Paul Morphy, a boy from New Orleans, played a count and a duke in a ...”

“... his life could not be anything more than a compendium of abstract ideas. But the remark was not as self-deprecating as it looks. It was among other things an allusion to John Stuart Mill, who had opened his own very celebrated Autobiography with a similar disclaimer: he had nothing to offer, he said, apart from an account of the origin and growth of his ...”

“... is the modern American variant of Enlightenment rationalism and progress, a creed not known for self-doubt or failures of nerve. The deeper the trouble, the more we are seen to have lost our way, the further we must go spatially and temporally to find the cultural models that will help us. In the stronger versions of this quest, there is either a place ...”

“... that she lacked not only the ruthlessness needed to make it to the top but also the boundless self-confidence and (for much of her career) the supportive spouse that a woman in a man’s world needs. Peel agrees, but he also rather gently notes her limitations – difficulty prioritising, lack of political nous – as a minister and as a party ...”

“... of constitutional meaning are as old and as august as the founding itself. And the theoretical self-consciousness Scalia brings to the table is a 20th-century phenomenon. In fact, he often sounds like a comparative literature student c.1983. He says it’s a ‘sad commentary’ that ‘American judges have no intelligible theory of what we do most’ and ...”

“... that has more successfully brought historical and literary insights together. If Donaldson’s self-effacing prose (so un-Jonsonian a quality) and the quietness of his reasoning may occasionally obscure the novelty and penetration of his narrative, there is no missing the surges of power when he tackles hitherto unyielding biographical mysteries. The ...”

“... eye – and I immediately saw that he was talking about himself as much as me, about the younger self he had been when he moved north. ‘It’s not what you think,’ he said. ‘Really. You can’t live here in splendid isolation. You may think you want that, but you don’t. You’d go mad in the end, believe me.’ He turned back to the ...”