“... adoption of a fashion, a new style of painting to be tried and dropped as soon as the need for self-expression became too great. And Expressionism, as Donald Judd points out, ‘is not an important idea in the art of this century, since it is the weakest attempt to deal with the disintegration of traditional representation’. Picasso could change styles ...”

“... was how he could sympathetically record, as official biographer, the life of one of the most self-aggrandising figures of our time. Ziegler is a writer before all else. Accorded access to the ‘riches’ of Mountbatten’s Broad-lands archives and with little inclination to investigate more deeply, he does what he is best at – producing a ...”

“... to mean ‘Bloom’ when he refers to ‘the Bloomian discourse’, and to mean the unity of the self when he speaks of the ‘integrity’ of the Bloomian monologue. His general argument is that Ulysses isn’t a realistic novel: ‘The Joycean text is not “viable”, is not “transformable” into the real. The whole artifice (and the whole success, as ...”

“... a damn what they want. We have always called the shots ... The Irish Republic is no more than a self-governing annexe of rich men’s dubious neocolonialism. We want a democratic socialist republic for all Ireland. The IRA follow the Moran line, and embrace a racialist view of Irish history based on attitudes of the late 19th century (and, ironically ...”

“... biologist arguing passionately that, of course, genes are not selfish, because they are not self-aware beings, to which alone the term ‘selfish’ can properly be applied. I found it impossible to respond to his passion. I suppose that Dawkins referred to genes as selfish because he imagined that no one would take him literally. I do not regard genes ...”

“... thoughts; he is a tyrannical but weak master, who looks to God or predestination for excuses. Self-righteously, or with God as his excuse, he flogs Galant and the other slaves for every offence. In a fit of rage he beats Galant’s child to death. The resistance he encounters in Galant is an animal one, like the resistance of horses to their ...”

“... for her ‘sunny benignity’ and ‘graceful radiance’, and even referred to her as ‘a second self of the poet’, but biographers have until now had little to put beside the colourful relationships with Annette and Dorothy. Mary, it is true, was credited by Wordsworth with the two best lines of his best-known poem – They flash upon that inward eye ...”

“... note either this, or the military carriage, or the regulation side-whiskers, or ‘some amount of self-importance and a certain air of command’, or the manner in which the Marine held his head and swung his cane. As the Holmes saga developed, Conan Doyle came to see that it would be to the advantage of the stories that his readers should be afforded a clear ...”

“... make an explicit comparison of that sort, but the reader senses a similar response: The reliable, self-respecting working man and his wife, who have learnt that if they want justice they must strive for it themselves, not wait for the gentry to give it to them – these are the rock on which the Labour Party was built, and it was these who Clem not only ...”

“... to Pareto (not without reason), concerned less with substantive and procedural justice than with self-protection and placement. ‘If Gladstone had been an Italian,’ he later remarked, ‘he certainly would only have opposed Salisbury for a couple of years. He would then have reached a compromise. England would have been governed by a Gladstone-Salisbury ...”

“... of which Coward was the theatrical master, worked as a kind of sympathetic magic to dispel both self-hatred and public scorn. ‘Has it ever struck you that flippancy might cover a very real embarrassment?’ someone asks, again in Private Lives. The most gossamer of his good plays, Private Lives is adamant on the subject of ...”

“... of illumination came from the more intimate circle in which the remarks were made. Cosima writes, self-consciously as always when her vision in concerned, that ‘Luther held table conversations, we hold bed conversations.’ One or two outsiders – the conductor and pianist Josef Rubinstein and after 1880 the painter Paul von Joukowsky – are part of the ...”

“... used for desirable ends is certainly an extraordinarily unlikely eventuality and perhaps even a self-contradictory idea. Good nuclear weapons have to be weapons which are feared so deeply and so steadily that there is never a real danger of their being used. But weapons of which there is literally no danger of their being used cannot rationally be feared at ...”

“... non-workers, malcontents, freelance pickets. Alice, the good girl manqué, not without a spot of self-delusion, throws in her lot with some bad hats. A stubborn and deadly innocence is one of her characteristics. Not that we’re invited, in these pages, to relish, or to marvel at, anyone’s depravity: Doris Lessing is far too conscientious to be ...”

“... Some decades coincide with historical periods, give or take a year or two. The Twenties were self-contained as the era between the Great War and the world slump, and the Thirties a loaded pause between one catastrophe and the next. But the Seventies had no separate identity. Recognising this, Phillip Whitehead begins his book – written to accompany the Channel 4 series of the same name – with the euphoria of Harold Wilson’s victory in 1964 ...”