“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”