“... stuff gets lost along the way – including, perhaps, the main thing that makes this magnificently self-indulgent cetological feast so delicious. Whaling could produce a great novel because it’s an activity in which a lot of what are now distinct arts and sciences messily converge. Hunting meets marine biology meets global economics meets geography meets ...”

“... to the breakdown of the marriage she’d been in since 1997, with the tall and saturnine Will Self? ‘I started being treated in October for a mental illness I hadn’t even heard of: complex post-traumatic stress disorder … It comes about when you suppress traumas and carry on regardless … You thrum with stress.’A couple of weeks after that was ...”

“... to be in any institution’).Nochlin had the ability to make complicated ideas appear simple and self-evident. She had a knack, too, for getting there first – an underacknowledged skill – and bringing up issues that would later find more complex theoretical formulations in the work of others. Her essay ‘The Imaginary Orient’, published in 1983, was ...”

“... order the prerogative courts to release suspected recusants and heretics, and to prevent enforced self-incrimination. It is here that he locates the origin of the courts’ power to review governmental and quasi-judicial invasions of personal liberty, including imprisonment for non-payment of taxes and fines, and it was in this context that chapter 29 of ...”

“... habit of hyperbole. He hasn’t found a voice: he is a person writing out family legends and self-analysis rather than a novelist. Still, we do have the beginning of an answer to the astute question Jean-Yves Tadié asks in his preface to the newly published manuscripts: ‘What was there in these 75 pages that was so good that he would write them, so ...”

“... up traditional Protestant attitudes as well as the power structure of Port Ticonderoga. The more self-consciously truthful a recording is, the more apt it is to be a lie. (Unless the reader learns to read slantwise as we do with the quotes from the Toronto Star, the Port Ticonderoga Herald and Banner, the Mail and Empire.) Truth is seldom or never ...”

“... Robert Creeley align him with Hart Crane and Keats as a poet vulnerable to the world and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck by the hectic Atlantic cutting at our feet, speaking of Hart Crane and the last words we would have in our mouths at that moment of ...”

“... of seguidillas, to frank discussions of masturbation and some remarkable doodles, including a self-portrait of Goya smoking a cigarette. The two men exchanged drawings of their penises (‘Jesus! What a testimony!’ Goya marvelled on receiving Zapater’s letter). During an illness in 1790, Goya told Zapater that ‘with your portrait before me, it seems ...”

“... on other arts. The depth of this influence reflects Wagner’s own versatility, and modest self-perception as an Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Beethoven rolled into one. At the start of the 20th century, as Ross puts it, Wagner ‘was like a massive object in space, drawing some entities into its orbit, making others bend just a little as they moved along ...”

“... colours, I imagine mine would be ginger.’A socialist and a Dreyfusard, Renard was both a self-styled outsider and a consummate insider. After a rather unpromising start in Paris, where he worked as a journalist, poet and dramatist, he attained financial security when he married Marie Morneau in 1888. The following year he became the co-founder and ...”

“... was Mayakovsky’s fatal error: ‘Like Strelnikov in the novel, he succumbed to a belief in the self-created rhetoric of his own dynamic function in society. That society needed him and benefited from this rhetoric is obvious.’This principle even extends to the relation between the poet and his poems:In the post-epilogue book of poems we find that Zhivago ...”

“... the weekdays could be as much moral as religious. Franklin’s paper-technology invention for self-improvement took the form of a table of thirteen virtues, from temperance to humility, and seven days, from Sunday to Saturday. He marked his failures to practise the virtues on the chart, day by day, and gave special attention to one virtue each ...”

“... the official and the fictional versions, it upends the one-sidedness of Bellow’s furious and self-justifying letters, and offers an account that is never knowingly uncomplicated, sentimental or prejudiced, and never dull when it comes to the business of examining the writer’s inner world. Bellow’s community was his subject and his subject was his ...”

“... far the most experienced voice in the Leave camp, was that ‘the important issue is democracy and self-government. It is about that principle. Self-government is more important than anything else.’ Lawson or Farage, it comes to the same thing: Nigels against the world. But the voice is the voice of Enoch. Mr Powell, as he ...”

“... fate on screen if it had been given a similar crash diet. Ellis’s most successful satire was self-satire: Lunar Park, a postmodern haunted house novel filled with post 9/11 dreads, in-jokes and autobiographical notes, with Jay and Bret themselves futzing around as doofus sidekicks. An uncharacteristically companionable novel from Mr Trendy Sicko, it also ...”