“... wife, Ellen Schwamm. ‘She insists that she regrets nothing. This is her discipline and self-assertion when, openly or not, one is in her charge.’ And: ‘I lived through Ellen’s will from time to time during those days. I had her agility and her subtlety vicariously. I had that merciful depth of her female ...”

“... autobiography. Obsession with meat-eating goes back to the emergence of a modern, élite, Indian self-consciousness in Bengal in the mid-19th century; here, though, the thrust was in the opposite direction, and was at once more radical and innocent than Gandhi’s vegetarianism; several educated Bengalis (frequently lampooned by other Bengalis) championed ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and his followers have complained of their oscillation between use of the terms ‘fragmented self’ and ‘disintegrative anxiety’ as subjective descriptions of the patients’ experiences and as identifying the processes which underlie them. Wittgenstein was struck by the felicity of Freud’s comparison of certain dream images to a rebus. A rebus is ...”

“... there is nowhere to go but back to Pittsburgh.The chorus goes in another direction. It is both self-mocking and yearning – the lament of a man who wants to take off his mask and shout. But throughout every story in ‘Lo and Behold!’, there is really only one voice, and that voice is the mask itself – ‘a portable heirloom’, Constance Rourke wrote ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of the Wave’, he charts his inexorable rise. Triumph after triumph is recorded in unashamedly self-congratulatory tones: ‘undoubtedly the best exhibition I have ever done’; ‘I was a great success’; ‘I do seem to have a talent for getting things moving.’ His soaring public image is carefully detailed, from his timely appearance on Desert Island ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... that most of them suggest considerable scepticism about the very notion of the consistent inner self pursued by modern biography. Outside this inconveniently unconfessional corpus there are a few comments about Behn from contemporaries, but these, unhelpfully, tend to consist of the sort of generic male jokes about women who publish, especially women who ...”

“... in the annual salons, she also began to work on what Burke calls ‘the creation of a mannered self-image corresponding to the stylisation of her art’. Following in Oscar Wilde’s footsteps, Loy decided to become a work of art. Her first marriage, to Stephen Haweis, an English painter and photographer, was unhappy. The strain of Haweis’s numerous ...”

“... with the adoption of the Tories’ ‘eye-wateringly tight’ spending limits and New Labour’s self-denying ordinance on higher income tax even for the reviled fat cats, the message is clear: for all the talk of long-termism, the City and the financial markets will have the final say. Putting the Threadneedle Street mandarins in charge guarantees ...”

“... The out-of-control independent counsel is not Kenneth Starr but a posse partly made up of the self-appointed scientific fraud-busters Walter Stewart and Ned Feder and their patron, the Democratic Congressman John Dingell. For the excellent Linda Tripp with her concealed tape-recorder read Imanishi-Kari’s young Irish-American co-worker at MIT, Margot ...”

“... activity has always been very much more fitful. Hence a certain amount of not unjustified self-congratulation in the Apostolic ranks, and hence the divergent reactions of observers. Lubenow and his subject seem at first glance an unlikely match. Lubenow is a political historian from New Jersey, and the author of two solid books on the Liberal Party ...”