“... enjoyed avoiding all family meals and eating alone. I envied her that. She seemed to me unusually self-sufficient in those days, though I noticed that she had a weakness for romantic films, musicals and, to my surprise, sophisticated women’s magazines – Vogue, Harpers, even the Tatler – in which she glanced addictively at a world that, so I ...”

“... Ray altered the landscape of visual representation in major ways. But the real achievement of its self-styled leader (the subject of Mark Polizzotti’s biography) is questionable. It is difficult not to find oneself writing biliously about so self-righteously bilious a man as André Breton. It is perhaps no accident ...”

“... to take an interest in writers and writing. So even the relatively peripheral movements of a self-consciously minor figure like Gay require for their useful exposition a lot of information about his betters. Like his famous friends, Gay professed to deplore the delays, snubs and false promises of patrons, but his persistence in seeking the offices and ...”

“... he believes are giants – there eight or nine elaborate negotiations between the extravagant self and the only slightly less extravagant world. Is this inn a castle? No, but everyone, and not just Don Quixote, is prepared to talk as if it is. Is this shining object a barber’s basin or Mambrino’s helmet? It’s a barber’s basin, but the barber is ...”

“... sympathy. Powered by them, he sets out to overcome ‘law’ in the bad old sense – formalistic, self-referential, supposedly autonomous law of the sort his generation and mine were taught at law school and read in the judgments of a judicial generation which has now passed on. This is a task which today is a great deal easier than overcoming sex, because ...”

“... strange miracles with perception and with language, so that in verses pared almost to the bone the self and objects in view become at the same time distinct and interfused: There is a blessing in the air, Which seems a sense of joy to yield To the bare trees, and mountains bare, And grass in the green field. But a mild March morning, like the one the ...”

“... attitude towards the profession on the first is at odds with his participation in the Bar’s self-satisfaction over the second. The Bar’s howl of rage at the end of the Eighties at the plans of a government for whom most of its members had voted to introduce more competition into the provision of legal services, and to cut out restrictive ...”

“... Proust despised for having supposed in his philistinism that the writer’s social and creative self were one and the same, that the person you dined and talked with in the cafés or salons was the same person who went home and wrote the Fleurs du mal or Madame Bovary. Proust insisted on two selves for the true writer, a surface ...”

“... in a cinema, was, significantly, Coriolanus. Mrs Melville, wife of the vicar of Stratford, a self-confessed Fascist and anti-semite who vigorously opposed the inclusion of the Soviet flag at the Birthday ceremonies, was a governor of the Shakespeare Theatre and must therefore have had a hand in the choice of Birthday play, the hero of which shared her ...”

“... photocopied typescripts of the Sigma project, launched in 1964 by novelist, junkie and self-described ‘cosmonaut of inner space’, the late Alexander Trocchi. Sigma was meant to revolutionise the planet: to bring together cultural dissidents from all over the West, until their various schemes and finally their single voice, seductive and ...”

“... as critics have unkindly called it) may join the De Lorean, cold fusion and Clive Sinclair’s C5 self-propelled sitz-bath in the technology junkyard. ‘Electrics’ – battery-powered automobiles – have a venerable pedigree. The first successful model was exhibited at the World’s Fair in 1892. William Morrison’s dirigible boasted a four-horsepower ...”

“... the New Yorker-ish knack – of making style a matter of poise and clarity and simplicity and self-concealment. He learnt what he could from the great fashion illustrators, the society cartoonists, Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm, but he got most of what is fresh in his drawings from a New-York-in-the-Fifties world of homosexual felicity, a literary ...”

“... the first eight decades, when it did so openly, but also afterwards, less openly and perhaps less self-consciously. Since 1947, the Indian state, hungry for big power status, has adhered more aggressively to the Euro-American, global, apparently perennial model of statecraft. Nehru’s part in this was crucial. He belonged to that section of the freedom ...”

“... just one drink’. This is something deeper than romantic longing; it’s tangled up with Ames’s self-conception: Reese ‘had taught him to be a woman … or he’d learned to be a woman with her. She had found him in a plastic state of early development, a second puberty, and she’d moulded him to her tastes.’ Although he has detransitioned, he still ...”

“... more than a thousand Palestinian prisoners.After the 2013 coup, the Egyptian military, under the self-proclaimed president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, started demolishing the tunnels that led to Egypt, effectively joining Israel’s blockade. Tunnelling was therefore redirected towards the border zone with Israel. In 2014, two separate groups of Palestinian ...”