“... what makes a painting come alive, as Coldstream was naturally aware: one of his finely turned self-deprecating lines referred to ‘the sort of configurations I make under the guise of representing what I see’. One hazard of his tactics is that for almost any spectator, even Laughton on occasion, those marks can seem to choke stretches of Coldstream’s ...”

“... sexuality, subversion, deviance, heterogeneity, popular culture, the body, the decentred self, the materiality of the sign, historicism, everyday life: this precocious post-structuralist, as Graham Pechey calls him, prefigured so much of our own times that it is surprising not to find allusions in his work to Posh and Becks. Since little of this ...”

“... formulated it before him, and it requires an uncomfortable reliance on Talleyrand’s letters and self-serving memoirs. Lawday also has a shaky grasp of non-Talleyrandian French history. Louis XV did not ‘rule the country according to the unbudging feudal concepts of his Bourbon forefathers’. Louis XVI was his predecessor’s grandson, not his son, was ...”

“... present-day relevance of their subject. That history shapes us and our world ought to appear so self-evident as to set it above tie-ins with newspaper headlines. Yet history never repeats itself exactly; and while ‘lessons can be learned’ from the past, one can always conjure a multitude of pasts to choose from. Presents, too. A basic classroom lesson ...”

“... seriousness. In trading rooms there’s an extraordinary, almost demonic fusion between the self-serving, relentless pursuit of profit, and some of the higher reaches of abstract thought, as embodied in the teams of post-doctoral mathematicians and physicists employed by every big bank. And for the competitive, simplistic characters who tend to be ...”

“... petits-fours. In her memoirs, she says more than her modern biographers about the ingenuity and self-discipline required of a salonnière: ‘One had to give up being oneself and devote oneself – and other people – entirely to the cult of the great man . . . to tie up all the threads which, from those divergent vanities, had to lead back to the same ...”

“... person with the power is always the one who cares less.’ There are countless other examples of self-repetition. One for My Baby appears to have been untouched by any editorial hand, or at least by an editorial hand that had also bothered to pick up Man and Boy. There is even one scene of sexual congress – a crucial plot point, as Parsons’s manuals ...”

“... a wooden performer. She became an actor when she found a way of presenting herself on screen, the self she presented being in two senses a Hollywood creation: both the kind of person the milieu permitted, and also the package sold to the world through her relationship to the press. The quality those directors found was not the natural woman from Grabtown, but ...”

“... 25: Once hope of a cure is extinguished in the newly blind adult, there is typically a period of self-mourning, in which the individual retreats from ordinary interaction. Often they speak little, respond tersely if at all to questions, and spend long hours sitting almost motionless. It is an insulative emotional mechanism, an understandable grief response ...”

“... but found himself ‘constantly interrupted by Mrs Thatcher . . . who fixed him with a blank, self-absorbed stare. “The extent of her ill-conceived ignorance at that time was only matched by the brazen vigour with which she expressed it,” he recalled.’ That was Thatcher all over, as even such slavish acolytes as Geoffrey Ripon gradually ...”

“... a fictional cast of mind, a willingness to make yourself up as you go along, to score out the old self and start again on a new page: in Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1990), Raban adopts a different identity (John Rayburn, Rainbird) for each place he visits. In Waxwings, set in the ‘virtual city’ of Seattle at the height of the dot.com boom, American reality ...”

“... of that peculiar mixture of diary and epistolary novel, spontaneous outpouring and literary self-consciousness, that gives the Memoirs their peculiar tone, and for which they deserve to be taken more seriously than they have been yet. The book is uneven, it is too long, and it runs out of steam towards the end, partly, as Wilson explains, because the ...”

“... is rather more complex than the gardens in which it results. It offers at least a fantasy of self-transformation. An accountant who spends his weekends laying York stone in the garden of his ruined manor in Somerset is imagining himself moving in two social directions at once: he enjoys pretending to be a manual worker; and he likes the idea that after ...”

“... Friedrich Strauss and countless others were just then demonstrating. Romantic conceptions of the self and wissenschaftliche approaches to the Bible combined to produce a liberal theology according to which the Bible was a cultural document rather than a series of commands, and the individual soul less an object of judgment than a site for religious ...”

“... at embarrassing length before responding with a blunt or irrelevant few words. With the garrulous, self-absorbed Wagner, he ‘stayed as good as dumb for almost an hour’, so Wagner complained, deciding that Schumann was ‘a highly gifted musician, but an impossible person’. This reticence made teaching difficult. A student at the Leipzig ...”