“... Therapy, they read like the occasional, mostly unrevised thoughts of a smart, self-conscious, possibly depressed young American; they can be tiring to read, but are sometimes quite funny. ‘i want to start a band’ expresses the will to power behind that desire: ‘i want my guitarist to be my jealous girlfriend/and i want my drummer to ...”

“... men in my time, yet I have never slain wantonly or stained my hand in innocent blood, but only in self-defence.’ The men’s aim is to find Curtis’s estranged brother, about which they are guardedly optimistic, and to discover King Solomon’s diamonds, about which – not knowing the title of the book – they are sceptical.The novel is peppered with ...”

“... Hilary Mantel put it less generously, but more succinctly: ‘Nurses and doctors are an elite, self-selected as sufficiently insensitive to get on with the job.’ The clinical language used to describe the loss of pulse when the heart fails is not subtle. There may be ‘rapid haemodynamic deterioration’: the blood stops moving around the ...”

“... Joan Rivers (drawn in ink while talking to the gay writer Armistead Maupin, and therefore not self-consciously posing), Rita Hayworth, Natalie Wood, Marlene Dietrich (drawn while posing, clearly), Simon Callow, John Gielgud and Ian McKellen. (My husband, David, incidentally, is related to Dietrich – on his mother’s side.) The screenwriters don’t ...”

“... lack of interest in this sort of thing is that it descends down to printers and publishers: it is self-fulfilling. But did Rastell’s biography and subject matter entangle with a sense of an emerging vernacular vitality? The Stationers’ Company is an expression of a quantity of archival labour and expertise that may never be surpassed: it is a great piling ...”

“... unto themselves. At the same time, their expressive language is for the most part pretty self-evident. With the exception of the few black shapes that made their appearance at the start and the end of her painting life, Martin’s palette is airy and light – neither heavy nor dark – and it’s no stretch to associate this with the classicism she ...”

“... base. And then, in 2013, in the aftermath of the hacking scandal and the failures of press self-regulation, the queen in council imposed a royal charter on self-regulation of the press. The Privy Council remains an important instrument of governmental business, though it is now essentially a mechanism by which ...”

“... the work as a whole was ‘nearly the most worthless’ ever published. Croker also alleged self-serving embellishment, perhaps even fabrication. His charges were reinforced when the heirs of the famous bluestocking Mary Delany – a cherished mentor of Burney’s who had corresponded with Richardson and Swift – accused her of lying, and made caustic ...”

“... of invisible boundaries recurs later in the book, this time in a different key. Frank, even in his self-imposed exile, remains attached to the rituals of suburban masculinity, chief among them the keeping of an immaculate garden. He’s frustrated by a persistent bald spot on the lawn and fences it off, scolding their dog whenever she gets too ...”

“... in the Maghreb. One device in the novel misfires: Gaddafi has an attachment to Van Gogh’s self-portrait with a bandaged ear. Khadra introduces this early on, in order to set up an unsuccessful parting shot: the dying rais remembers his mother telling him, when he was a boy, that he was deaf to reason in one ear, while the other listened only to ...”

“... economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton in a paper published in 2015. These deaths are the result of self-inflicted violence, either suicides or drug and alcohol overdoses (‘poisonings’ in the language of the report), particularly affecting white Americans living in the parts of the country that voted overwhelmingly for Trump – the South, the ...”

“... Nietzsche thought had vanished from the earth.’ It is a stirring peroration and one whose self-declared ‘pessimism’ and sober wisdom read all the more persuasively in the light of public events, seven years on from the essay’s initial appearance in New Left Review. If – once again – I call its direction of travel ‘odd’, it is because I ...”

“... black silk doublet, an outfit pegged somewhere between modesty and ostentation. He fixes us with a self-assured gaze; there is the trace of a smile. He holds a pair of soft gloves; a later portrait, in which he looks more like a courtier, has him clasping a purse, suggesting the precariousness of riches as much as their importance. Analysis of this second ...”

“... be a world of panel discussions, graduate student workshops, grant applications, affect theory and self-help jargon. Late in the book she makes a parenthetical observation about academia, ‘a field known for articulating liberatory possibilities in language that often excites little to no felt sense of them’. The verb ‘perseverate’ keeps appearing, so ...”

“... to offer. The US was caught on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, as a proud promoter of self-determination, it wished to identify itself with anti-colonialism. On the other, it felt obliged to show solidarity with Britain, which was the archetypal imperial power and a valued partner in the Cold War. In attempting to satisfy both requirements, the US ...”