“... Genealogy of Morality – but rather that the ‘English psychologists’ appear to be driven by self-loathing. Under the cover of cool empiricism lies a ‘secret, malicious … instinct to belittle humans’, or a disillusioned idealism, or maybe just ‘a bit of everything, a bit of vulgarity, a bit of gloominess, a bit of hostility to Christianity, a ...”

“... to underpin political independence. They boasted that they had done more in a few years to achieve self-determination thanks to oil than in decades of fighting with Kalashnikovs. The failure of this dream was sudden and almost total. In 2014 the Kurds came under attack from Islamic State and the price of oil fell. The peshmerga fled even faster than the Iraqi ...”

“... for another push against the system. Penal colonisation has given way to ‘independent’ self-colonisation. Keneally points out that the 1999 referendum on the monarchy turned into a popular revolt against the system of two-party professional politicos. Neither old nor new immigrants could stand the idea that they (and not ordinary voters) would ...”

“... or Jessica Mitford. The world might have seemed less pressing, and more adaptable to her invented self. Having a bad character can also mean being at home with one’s true predicament. It is taken for granted in the posh style, and certainly by the Mitford girls, that one is not necessarily very nice and that not being nice need not be the end of the ...”

“... is the biography of his style. Yet style is a manifestation of much more than a writer’s own self-fashioning: it speaks of the places he has been and is coloured by what happened there, and in that way comes to define the rhythms of his prose and the patterns of his belief. A biography of Hemingway’s style will amount to nothing if it can’t exhume ...”

“... with beliefs which, unknown or rejected in earlier centuries, had come to be taken for granted, as self-evident truths’. Of course popular beliefs had to fall into line with the bureaucracy’s position, and Cohn provides plenty of examples to show that they did: rural and small-town societies were rich in resentments, ancestral curses and fears of the ...”

“... lists are clearly grounded in the general dynamics of today’s global capitalism. This link is self-evident in the case of ecological problems and the poverty gap between North and South. Is the rise of Islamism not conditioned by the refusal of Muslim civilisation to accept the social dynamics of capitalism? Is the strange turn in China not to do with the ...”

“... don’t keep a diary at all, I wouldn’t know what for; nothing happens to me to stir my inmost self. This applies even if I weep, as I did yesterday in a cinematographic theatre in Verona. I am capable of enjoying human relationships, but not of experiencing them.’ Again, the note cannot be sent until it has been reclassified as a found object. Its ...”

“... affairs, then separation and divorce; the miseries and raptures of the newly discovered sexual self; difficulties with alienated, confused children; the illness, decline and death of one parent, then the other; the inevitable regrets and sorrows. These are some of the familiar threads of Munro’s fiction. She has never ceased to be enthralled by her own ...”

“... go on a journey’. This contemporary description indirectly acknowledges Turpin’s status as a self-defined gentleman (his father was a butcher), for gentlemen took horse, while the poor walked. For weeks, Turpin had been ‘eating, drinking and carousing’, ‘joking, drinking and telling stories’ with an unending stream of visitors to the York ...”

“... it looked out from her steady eyes.’ Whether it was a living soul or a ‘radiant sovereign self’ (Margaret Fuller’s version of Wollstonecraft) that women saw in the author of The Rights of Woman, what the heroic image replaced – the woman one could not bear to be, generally one’s mother – was as important as the fantasy of liberated womanhood ...”

“... calls – that Guernica proved Picasso had lost his stuff, for instance – might seem wrong; his self-assurance might verge on narrow-mindedness; the game might bore us. But the rulings were clear: by 1954, Jackson Pollock’s paintings were ‘forced’ and ‘dressed up’; Clyfford Still never left the minor league; Marcel Duchamp was a joker (not in a ...”

“... kindly country gent, made him the perfect figurehead for the new propriety. That George was also a self-satisfied buffoon made him a delight for satirists. Barrell gives a wonderfully funny account of royal holidays spent in Weymouth, where one of the king’s favourite recreations was riding out to meet the locals. The book’s cover illustration is a Gillray ...”

“... his own disillusioned generation, he seemed perpetually crosser than most. Towering, handsome, self-assured (‘Everyone always seems to have known me’), this Hungarian emigrant was quite unlike the pallid, fish-eyed Professor Otto Silenus, Evelyn Waugh’s caricature Modernist. Silenus had come to the Home Counties spouting aphorisms from the Bauhaus ...”

“... of Richard and Richmond fighting, and I gilded it after which I cut it out with no white.’ This self-assured mixture of literature and art prefigures the preoccupations of Gabriel’s life. It is a medievalist text that draws his attention, and he responds first by acting parts of it out with his siblings and then by constructing a picture. In his early ...”