“... 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 ...”

“... artist Zhang Huan has become visible far beyond China. Such is the paradox of withdrawal and self-advancement for its belated avant-garde, and more generally in the late Nineties, for the country’s cultural élite. In Beijing’s dilapidated East Village, where urban bohemians live cheek by jowl with peasant farmers and other marginal groups, a small ...”

“... or a poem to others to read (which we all do all the time). It can also be a sophisticated and a self-conscious activity: to evaluate a passage entails forming an idea of what it is trying to achieve and working out in detail whether or not, and how, it achieves it. The reason why criticism is fun, and democratic, and subject to change, is that other people ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... has edited herself into the story: she is looking out at her father and infant brother, her unborn self, the pregnant mother. A corporeal ghost, back from the future, eavesdropping on that captured scene, the group on the grass. While some unknown photographer presses the shutter. What is intriguing is how she uses her technique, the layering, the rubbing ...”

“... American corporations who profit from state-funded violence and who advertise their greed as a self-righteous war on evil. It is nice to see that, after a century and a half of misinformed adulation, Vidocq is finally getting his just deserts. Eugène-François Vidocq was born in 1775 in Arras, where his parents ran a bakery. After bullying and pilfering ...”

“... of work on the Concerto for two pianos. On the way he takes in Stravinsky’s astonishing self-creation with The Firebird ballet, written when he was 27 (there had been little indication of his genius before that), the revolutionary achievement of the subsequent Diaghilev ballets, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring; the vivid transformation of Russian ...”

“... been suicidal (he claimed his last jump would be without a harness, or was that just an artist’s self-promotion?) and he dies in the end of unrelated natural causes (a heart condition) somewhere near Saginaw, Michigan, deep in the heart of the country. (Saginaw: the place Paul Simon’s protagonist hitchhikes from when he goes ‘to look for ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... drove his journalism, that ‘decision-makers were weaker, more incompetent, more divided, more self-destructively corrupt than they liked people to understand and hence more vulnerable to journalistic attack and exposure.’It’s hard now to imagine just how pompous, stuffy, callous and arrogant Britain’s rulers were in the 1930s – and that includes ...”

“... three strands of post-liberal thought have emerged over the last decade. Most prominent are the self-declared ‘populists’, such as Sohrab Ahmari and the GOP senator Josh Hawley, who seek to replace the Reaganite fusion of pro-market ideology and traditional morals with a ‘working-class conservatism’. Then there are the ‘National ...”

“... War. That quote has been much cited since by patronising commentators to signal the pettiness, self-absorption and venom of Irish feuds over the northern part of Ireland. From the Government of Ireland Act in 1920, which first partitioned Ireland, to the Northern Ireland Protocol in 2019, which kept the North inside the EU single market for goods by means ...”

“... Herbert’s poems vividly describe the inner weather of Christian devotion. It’s all there: self-abasement before God; horror at his absence; meditation on the boundless enormity of sin; meditation on the boundless generosity of Christ’s sacrifice; outpourings of gratitude and love; self-excoriation for insufficient ...”