“... work; there are great writers whose letters and/or diaries add up to masterpieces of self-portraiture (Byron, Woolf, Flaubert); there are, and this, too, is a contemporary phenomenon, writers who turn to fiction after an explicitly autobiographical first book. But none of those cases is quite the same as that of the novelist of established ...”

“... republican institutions is far deeper, more insidious, because it rests on the popular delusion of self-government and independence.’ However much she yearned to see the anarchist movement grow out of its enfeebling isolation, she refused to violate her principles by engaging in the political process. ‘Universal suffrage,’ Proudhon had said, ‘is the ...”

“... which contains a whole range of other alternatives, and their statement is notably free from the self-righteousness which so easily afflicts reformers. The catch about Animal Liberation, however, is that, from the theoretical angle, it is one-legged. Singer is a Utilitarian, grounding the claims of animals on a general human duty to relieve suffering and ...”

“... individual … no longer lived and breathed. She desired nothing but his dominion over her abased self.’ Lawrence is marvellous, but his effect on other writers is usually a bad thing.So how come The Shutter of Snow is so interesting? The toughie cool modernists in 1920s Paris were probably a better model for Coleman’s style, reining in the prolixity on ...”

“... to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression’. Exasperated and increasingly poor, he puts aside his current project, a novel based on Barthes’s S/Z, and writes a pseudonymous parody of a recent hit, We’s Lives in Da Ghetto. He initially calls the book My Pafology and later renames it ...”

“... its maximum gestural impact.When he slipped away from England and his first wife in 1898, for a self-appointed exile in Dieppe, Paris and Venice, Sickert left behind a reputation as foremost apostle to the ‘genius’, he whose ‘lightest utterance is inspired’, the ‘immortal’, London’s ‘living Old Master’. Whistler was his first point of ...”

“... 50 million population of the United Kingdom. This seems to me to be a case where our principle of self-determination ought to take second place behind the principle that in a democratic society the minority have to bow to the majority. But the islanders weren’t having any of this; and so successive British governments, clearly frightened of the public (or ...”

“... ruthless, underhanded son of a bitch’. With Barnes, there was no middle ground, minuscule self-doubt and no remorse over those he belittled, slandered and discarded; you were either in or, forever, out. As is often the case with those described as ‘complex’, Barnes had only two gears: forward or reverse, nice or nasty, the latter mode suddenly ...”

“... by Rembrandt or Goya or Manet or Degas, you can trace their changing intentions. For instance, a self-portrait made by Degas when he was 23 began as a light etch, with fine, spaced-out cross-hatching. Later, it became richer – the lines dense and black – yet remained a faint idea of a self: the hands unfinished, the ...”

“... sophisticated, eventually becoming more real than the man. Like all writers, Rushdie had a shadow self, and had to deal with people confusing him with his creations, but the shadow remained a function of the self. The fatwa severed the shadow from the man. It travelled all over the world, terrorised people and entrenched ...”

“... Drank some ’48 claret alone.’ At the same time, like many sybarites, he was drenched in self-pity, deploring the emptiness of a life of pleasure and, looking back, saw his existence as a dark tunnel. Simplicity of life was the only answer, but one not adopted at Mentmore, where, as that waspish paedophile Loulou Harcourt claimed, ‘truffles seem to ...”

“... natural superiority … was modelled on the heroes of John Buchan: decent, anti-intellectual, self-deprecating and eternally stiff of upper lip’. Sometimes, the officer in Russia actually was one of Buchan’s or Rudyard Kipling’s heroes: Brigadier-General Ironside, earlier encountered by Buchan in Africa after the Second Boer War, served as ...”

“... about Pompey and Caesar.’ It’s easy to forget, because we know what happened next, but also self-evidently true, as we know from our own experience: however horrifying the political catastrophe unfolding around us, we still devote ourselves primarily to the interpersonal and institutional jostling of our own little lives. So it was at Rome, and in those ...”

“... it was nicknamed the ‘lunch-hour abortion’. Women’s liberation activists running their own self-help clinic began studying Karman’s method. One member, Lorraine Rothman, noticed a dangerous oversight: there was no valve to stop air passing into the uterus. Using easily acquired materials – aquarium tubing, a Mason jar – Rothman made a menstrual ...”

“... hegemony go hand in hand with something much more mundane: a tendency among their leaders to seek self-enrichment. Authoritarianism goes hand in hand with kleptocracy (a term coined by the Polish-British sociologist Stanislav Andreski in the late 1960s). The straightforward explanation is that the absence of legal and political constraints makes ...”