“... the countryside throwing up the meeting-halls that the communes needed for their mass-rallies and self-criticism sessions. Many of the interviewees work very hard: we meet a young dentist who is on call for 27 days at a stretch, takes a two-hour bus ride to her home, and spends her three-day leave coping with the month’s accumulated housework. Husbands are ...”

“... a life of its own: one conspirator, T-Jay Mackey, decides that Everett’s plan ‘was anxious and self-absorbed. It lacked the full heat of feeling. They had to take it all the way.’ The snipers must shoot to kill. But the lesson still applies. As Mackey explains: The barrier is down ... When Jack sent out the word to get Castro, he put himself in a world ...”

“... teachers; and his mother’s family were highly respectable Christian men and women, ‘self-righteous’ non-drinkers, non-smokers, non-gamblers. It is a point of Gates’s memoir that despite national social upheaval in the Sixties, Piedmont coloured did not lose their identities and sense of worth; the boy Skip was made to feel loved at all ...”

“... modern cities, the Manchester of the late Middle Ages, Florence. Her brothers are merchants, ‘self-retired/In hungry pride and gainful cowardice’, ‘ledgermen’ who stay at home. Yet slaves sweated for them ‘In torched mines and noisy factories’ and For them the Ceylon diver held his breath,      And went all naked to the hungry shark; For ...”

“... a memoir in fragments, its relative in the past would be Dante’s Vita Nuova, with its rigour of self-examination, and in more recent times, Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, which does not flinch either at the constant companionship of pain. The author whispers to her friend Jim dying in a hospital bed: ‘You are surrounded by friends who love ...”

“... from the memorandum whether Kurchatov knew in July 1943 about Fermi’s success in achieving a self-sustaining chain reaction in a uranium graphite pile in Chicago the previous December’ – a much more restrained formulation. But then it was extremely improbable that Soviet espionage, which was already providing Moscow with a great deal of detail, would ...”

“... or enumerating, of a woman’s exquisite body parts with a mixture of fetishistic rapture and male self-regard. His other classical template is the flaying of Marsyas in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the satyr’s terrible cry: ‘Who is it that tears me from myself?’ The flaying image is arguably more convincingly and consistently applicable to a study of ...”

“... paradox of literary survivance [sic], crucial to Western high culture from Pindar to Mallarmé and self-evidently central to Chardin’s painting, has altered.’ Indeed it has, and there may be ample reason to worry about what cyber-space and virtual reality are going to do to the so-called Gutenberg galaxy. But though one may share his nostalgia for the ...”

“... had grown enormously’ since he first met her. ‘She has become a lady of over-whelming self-confidence and self-importance,’ he told his diary. Yet, if that verdict is just, the mind-broadening seminars and the contacts with the intellectually sharp Mr Urban and others probably had quite a lot to do with the ...”

“... some gap or dip occasionally disclosed’. Possibly they also talked about alienation, loneliness, self-disgust and self-forgiveness, since both of them were something other, or more, than the bird-and-weather writers their readers knew. In May 1914 Thomas tells Frost that he ought to get started on a book about speech and ...”

“... knife. Don’t said the cut. The knife needs to cut but is disgusted by blood: the apologetic and self-hating cut has to bleed in order to feel. Swenson’s brilliant poem sets out the archetypal roles of slasher and victim, sadist and masochist, male and female, that have become central obsessions of contemporary culture. Susanna Moore’s novel In the ...”

“... form of perpetual present, one that implies too many quick changes backstage, as though the self-inflicted, then eluded, task of showing exactly how a preposterous love can filter into preposterous sourness and back again were too much for the writer’s skills. But then, who wants another finely-crafted psychological novel about coupledom? Despite the ...”

“... for a public drubbing in language which he would have discarded as extreme (‘tasteless, tacky, self-centred’) in his back-bench heyday as a semi house-trained polecat. The army of rats has now been joined by Lord McAlpine of West Green, Thatcher’s ‘jolly bagman’, as he calls himself. Margaret Thatcher’s affection for the British construction ...”

“... am like Scrooge? Have I not renounced all for Art? The Scrooge-Christ of Art, who has hoarded his self to Writing the Father. And not gained the world. Because who buys his books? And lost his soul. Wherein lie all my profits?’ Lucchesi feels very good. No chance he’ll weep now. Raises window high to let in a blast of icy air. Inhales deep. The heat had ...”

“... Although I knew him to be some what more literary-worldly than he liked to seem, the drift of his self-presentation had always been to stand craggily aloof from metropolitan book-circuses. Also his most recent Moortown poems had impressively traversed the dead-end he seemed to have run into with the blood-drenched Crow. He appeared to have found a new line ...”