“... Stasi’s domestic role as he claims? The old prestidigitator is disarmingly free with generalised self-criticism. ‘Throughout my career I overlooked, minimised or rationalised repressive episodes,’ he says. What the book lacks is specifics. In a rather different sense from his father, Markus Wolf also led a charmed life, because he was always looking the ...”

“... it off.’ (Why hadn’t he already seen My Fair Lady?) Audrey in bed, watching herself: such star self-inspection fascinates me. Once, in real life, I asked Vanessa Redgrave what she felt like when she watched herself on screen. She said that she tried to be objective about herself, and that an actor grows accustomed to ...”

“... with all those Biblical references. The narrator of The Sorrows of Satan, Geoffrey Tempest, is a self-pitying failed novelist who receives by the same post the news that he has been left five million pounds and a friendly self-introduction from a mysterious Prince Lucio Rimânez. When the superbly poised Prince ...”

“... rejects James’s own explanation of his career. This was false in several respects, and certainly self-serving, but there was some truth in it. James denied being a criminal (which he certainly was), and argued that he could not surrender and prove his innocence because Radical Republicans, his wartime enemies, would lynch him. The wave of robberies and ...”

“... sounds the nicest, and certainly the most soulful, though not without faults: she was terribly self-absorbed and self-pitying. James Fox is her grandson, but he gives her only just over two columns of entries in his index, while Nancy has four and a half, with a long section on ‘character’. It has subheadings for ...”

“... should constitute a State is contrary to the nature of modern civilisation’. The ethnically self-standing was the politically and morally self-stultifying. It obstructed human evolution, not least because it prevented the more civilised from elevating the less. Social progress depended on ‘the mixture of races under ...”

“... or deposed in coups or became paranoiac dictators. The significance of independence and self-determination, ‘the two pillars that make possible our modernisation’, have been lost. What remains is the ‘narrative of failed nation-states, the theatres of Afro-pessimism’. One of Diawara’s projects in The Search for Africa is to script a film ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of things without designations, back where there were no proper names, not even a name for the self. Linnaeus’ story reminds us by how thin a thread our language ties us to the familiar world. Heller-Roazen’s archive of the forgotten has the similarly salutary effect of helping us see what was always there, but somehow invisible or, more ...”

“... 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 ...”