“... The young women she had overheard, Ogden thought, were ‘aggressively intelligent ... not at all self-conscious in their tailor-made clothes, not ashamed of their cropped hair; women who did things well ... women who counted and who would go on counting ... They might still be in the minority and yet they sprang up everywhere.’ This passage, with its ...”

“... the Conservative meltdown and the dismissal of the sorriest rump of chancers, carpet-baggers and self-serving apologists ever inflicted on a passive democracy. The relish with which I looked forward to my site visit was seasoned with a nip of low-level guilt. Everything I knew and everything I had found out about the New Millennium Experience confirmed it as ...”

“... in which he’d been trained as the long-lost twin of New Criticism: both treated texts as self-contained structures, accepted only internal evidence, and ignored cultural context. The division of labour between textual editors and literary critics made no sense to him, because ‘the material forms of books, the non-verbal elements of the typographic ...”

“... Chief among these is ‘sprawl’, defined as ease, cheerful excess, unbuttonedness and unsnobbish self-confidence: ‘Sprawl is really classless ... Sprawl is loose-limbed in its mind.’ Murray’s verse really does sprawl, and there’s a lot of it: some is blustery, sloppy or hard to listen to. His work flaunts its roughness, its male friendliness, its ...”

“... the relationship. In Keep the Aspidistra Flying, George Orwell gave his friendless, dowdy and self-pitying protagonist, Comstock, one true pal: the editor and patron Ravelston, proprietor of the small yet reliable magazine Antichrist. This Ravelston – some composite of Sir Richard Rees and John Middleton Murry – was a hedonistic yet guilt-ridden ...”

“... sensible was that the person before us was a Smiths fan too – the ultimate fan – and his self-disgust and neuroses seemed to puncture the ethos of the 1980s rather nicely. The fans were outfanned by the object of their fanaticism: here was a pop phenomenon made up of pop phenomena – Morrissey’s influences were the whole point of him, it ...”

“... and taking him back to Haddam for a year or two. To this end, he packs a copy of Emerson’s Self-Reliance and tries to work up seasonal pep talks ‘under the syllabus topic of “Reconciling Past and Present: From Fragmentation to Unity and Independence”’. Frank also has a rubric for this stage of his life, ‘a time I think of as the Existence ...”

“... a political grouping nor a social stratum, the mass denoted a pathological orientation of the self. Arendt claimed that its members had no interests, no concern for their ‘wellbeing’ or survival, no beliefs, community or identity. What they had was an anxiety brought on by loneliness, ‘the experience of not belonging to the world’, and a desire to ...”

“... had carved into the walls of the castle, he was an arriviste; though whether one regarded him as a self-serving upstart intolerably ornamented with the privileges of his betters, or as a bold new talent who might be capable of securing a Protestant succession against the popish corruption of the older nobility, depended on one’s allegiance. In 1575, the ...”

“... based on a different kind of inner discipline, a confrontation of the conflicting desires in the self, and a willing dispossession which comes close to Gandhi’s ideas of passive or non-violent resistance. Those who have been the objects of exclusion and derision are already freer, Woolf suggests, from the ‘unreal loyalties’ that prompt ...”

“... based on class. This is reflected in every aspect of their branding, packaging, advertising and self-image: Marks & Spencer’s is very middle-class, Sainsbury’s is middle-class, Tesco is careful to track the aspirations of the British mass market, and Asda is more like its former, cheap-but-cheerful self than it is ...”

“... no pudeur about expressing his resentments or his enthusiasms. To a casual teenaged visitor his self-centredness was somehow much more sympathetic than it sounds when recorded in cold print. But it was wearing to live with, not least for himself.Why was Sassoon like this? In the public mind he remained not only one of the most celebrated poets of the Great ...”

“... Spender, Auden and Day-Lewis), a composite creature marked by its blend of glib Marxism, shameless self-advertising and large quantities of indifferent verse. As the popular label for the period suggests, Auden was from the start the dominating presence, and poetically he increasingly came to be seen as being in a class of his own. MacNeice was, in ...”

“... comedy riff the bell jar of a borrowed literary aesthetic. Despite the focus on reclusion and self-sacrifice, the book becomes close to overexcited when the subject is sociable, magnetic, preposterous Abravanel. It isn’t easy for a caricaturist to master watercolour. Why should he try? The techniques are hardly complementary. When Abravanel is the ...”

“... Shoes are literally fetishised by the extraordinary Bruno Schulz in his pictures of crouching, self-abasing men – self-portraits often – excruciated with desire at the feet and elegant shoes of fancy women holding whips or with their noses in the air. Unworldly Yeshiva boys and alarmed young Hassids encounter pairs ...”