“... they’re candid or not. They’re obviously not candid in some respects. They were already self-bowdlerised before Rimington submitted them to her MI5 vetters, who insisted she bowdlerise them some more, all in the interests of ‘national security’. Whether the parts that remain are truthful is impossible for an outsider to say. I do know that many ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and who wrote without rage or resentment, expressing her genius ‘whole and entire’. Such self-effacing purity eludes Woolf, who, like the angry Charlotte Brontë writing of herself when she should be writing of her characters, becomes a figure in her own essay, scribbling flames over the face of Professor von X. In the practice of what she calls ...”

“... had taken over from art and religion as the custodian of truth. The World Spirit had come to self-consciousness in his own head, rendering any less rational form of knowledge outmoded. Yet religion has retained its capacity to spark riots and launch civil wars, while art has survived as a refined version of religion for the intelligentsia: most aesthetic ...”

“... writer he enormously admired), his shortcomings are readily apparent. Mencken’s jokes are always self-serving: they elevate the humorist and those who think him funny at somebody else’s expense, generally a mass of less intelligent somebodies. When he says, ‘I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only ...”

“... this pamphlet as a typical example of 1840s utopian reformism – a combination of grand ambition, self-interest and petty detail: the thickness of walls in the work-camps, the necessary quantities of animal dung, the projected income from potatoes and vegetables. It is also typical of the future Napoleon III. Like most of his acts and utterances, it manages ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... opening sequence of Un Chien andalou. The mutilation of symbol, value, history and even of self was crucial to the Modernist urge. The moderns wanted to be new, fast. This urgency demanded that the old be eliminated. ‘I am dynamite,’ Nietzsche bellowed. Echoing this, the French incendiary Louis Aragon remarked that he could think of nothing more ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... he wants to change his own life.’But undoing false narratives, in the hope that a more authentic self might somehow be located, requires a repositioning on two fronts: in the way a person chooses to interact with and represent the world, and in the way they make sense of their past. At home in Cambridge, Tunde decides to shower with a bar of black soap. He ...”

“... seem like cards drawn from a tarot deck, a modern arcana of types. A stuntman is an ‘alternate self’ who takes ‘the actual risks in the manufacture of a fictional being whose exposure to danger was supposedly fundamental to its identity’. One could say that G, by painting upside-down works, is a stuntman of a different kind. Another G, a Black ...”

“... hell and devil’). To her contemporaries, the reasons for taking a male pen name would have been self-evident.Murry told Whitaker that if she had enough stories for a collection (which she soon did) he would help to find her a publisher. The stories in Frost in April explore the lives of farmers, navvies, florists, young women on ...”

“... liberal German writers shy away from [Berlin’s war experience] to avoid any hint of national self-pity,’ Ian Buruma comments. Nazi propaganda told the citizens to ‘durchhalten, ausharren’ – hold firm, stick it out – and almost to the end, with Russian tanks entering the suburbs, most of them did. In Britain under the Blitz, the government ...”

“... the half-strategic trace of a working-class accent. Though he wouldn’t say so, it reinforces his self-respect to feel that, Prosecco notwithstanding, he remains a Dubliner ‘coarse as cabbage’. The discomfort makes sense too. It must be easier to enjoy money if you’ve made it yourself. One literary pitfall The Lemur does not altogether avoid is that of ...”

“... two countries, Turkey and China, in chapters combining genuinely interesting information with self-indulgent asides. It’s puzzling that he doesn’t mention recent cases in which the Turkish government successfully secured the return of antiquities from several leading American museums, such as the statue of Herakles from the Museum of Fine Arts in ...”