“... ends. The evidence which survives those long dead usually leaves their buried lives guarded by the self-composure of letters: this intelligent novelist, pursuing the intimacy of relations between inner and outer selves, works out from the psychological freedom of insight which is her privilege, to incorporate the formally-determined behaviour, the strict ...”

“... claim that the Holocaust had been tailored to the ‘true’ underlying preferences of Jews for self-destruction). But the sense in which utility is made observable by this method is a rather weak one. This could be seen as the result of unnecessarily restricting (to choice behaviour) the range of evidence that is relevant to establishing what people’s ...”

“... as if they were people he knew, noting Whitman’s ‘good humour’, Joyce’s ‘tireless self-regard’, Edmund Wilson’s ‘dogged honesty’. In a coy foreword, he pretends to be diffident about his criticism (‘Another book. Another slain forest’), and sets himself up as an amateur, dabbling in criticism to pay his alimony. But for all his ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... in Michael Roberts’s classic Faber Book of Modern Verse. Sachie is also valued as the prince of self-help publishing: according to the Oxford Companion to English Verse, between 1972 and 1978 he ‘privately printed’ no fewer than 43 collections of his verse. All in all, nobody is nowadays likely to complain much if we speak of the Sitwells as curious ...”

“... relationship with Jean to the comparative method of moving beyond the limitations of one’s own self-observation. E’en as the munelicht’s borrowed frae the sun I ha’e my knowledge o’ mysel’ frae thee, And much that nane but thee can e’er mak clear, Save my licht’s frae the source, is dark to me. Where Davie is surprisingly weak is on ...”

“... to devise poses. One may also feel that there is something ‘stagey’ about some of his early self-portraits and about some of his early action-filled paintings such as the Belshazzar’s Feast in the National Gallery. It is, however, hard to believe that this was intended. And anything less like a ‘studio event’ than the Woman taken in Adultery or ...”

“... trick, in which she appeals for help after she has derailed her chain with her own hands or self-inflicted a puncture. Foreign experience is also helpful in other ways. Meeting a migrant from Swat, she introduces herself as a friend of the late Wali. Trying to win over truculent Rastafarians, she produces photographs of herself in Ethiopia with Haile ...”

“... bespeaks a certain good opinion of oneself, hope to catch him in a posture of arrogance or self-importance, but O’Brien is far too fly for that. So he appears to one and all as a sort of pirate battleship, mounting heavy guns but belonging to no Navy and dangerously liable to sink anything he comes across. He attracted the nickname ‘The ...”

“... some of her male contemporaries, she felt herself to be a creature of her circumstances and not a self-fathered imagination. If she was unwilling to renounce her poetic ambitions altogether, she must smuggle them in under cover of playfulness or pedagogy. Although they admit that much of what Barbauld wrote ‘might be considered typical women’s ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... tenth anniversary of Mrs Thatcher’s premiership. Studying Mr Major’s ‘effect’ is, however, self-evidently more difficult. Whatever one thinks of Mrs Thatcher she was undoubtedly a larger-than-life figure who, one way or another, dominated her cabinet and party. Furthermore, in 1989, though it was clear the whole enterprise was going wildly off the ...”

“... with Fouquet’s Agnès Sorel as the Virgin, where the sitter’s globular white breast thrusts it-self provocatively out at the viewer above a tightly-laced bodice; and with Grünewald’s green, twisted, lacerated body of Christ on the Cross, which, since it figured suffering and Christianity, both outside the pale in my progressive Jewish family, I ...”

“... Brand (written at the age of 37) that he consciously undertook that ‘radical process of self-reinvention to create an outward image that would become – through the Victorian fashion for portrait photography – the agent of his spreading fame’. And it was this Ibsen – he of the shaved lip and mutton-chop whiskers, the wardrobe of a London ...”