“... Jean Arp, Sonia Delaunay and the Bauhaus. Indeed, by the time he moved to Paris, he was a self-declared abstract artist. The portraits of Jeannine, with which the recent Beaubourg exhibition opened, and which reveal the influence of El Greco and Blue Period Picasso, were now a thing of the past.Up to 1946, when for the first time it takes on a ...”

“... to totalitarianism became the governing intellectual framework for the West in the Cold War. His self-conscious marginality, the cause of enormous struggle during his life, became a posthumous badge of authenticity: it helped reassure countless liberals and leftists that one could oppose the Soviet Union without giving up on the dream of liberation from ...”

“... when I was 18 and he was 55. I was twenty when I started sitting for him. I was a very romantic, self-conscious young woman. My voluptuousness (as Lucian described my curves) gave me a maternal air. I offered the notion of comfort to Lucian, which he felt badly in need of. But the intimacy that evolved between us was a challenge for him. He was threatened by ...”

“... confronting the editor of Hamlet, Professor Jenkins’s worst difficulties are of another, self-imposed sort. His text is conservative: setting aside spelling and punctuation differences, I totted up 66 verbal departures from Dover Wilson’s revolutionary New Cambridge edition, and in about two-thirds of these cases Jenkins opts for the second Quarto ...”

“... break between the first three, conceived early on as a trilogy, and the last, which is more self-standing, with features that mark it off from its predecessors. Covering the epoch from the French Revolution to the First World War, the trilogy follows a consistent scheme, classically Marxist in its logic: each volume begins with an account of the ...”

“... his daughter was somehow never picked up at her school. But Heshu’s tone is also resigned, self-blaming and philosophical, the voice, we might be tempted to say, of a ‘modern’ child: ‘It is evident that I shouldn’t be a part of you. I take all the blame openly – I’m not the child you wanted or expected me to be. disappointments are born of ...”

“... As the editors point out, Fanon’s youthful protagonists are driven by his own obsessions: ‘the self-transformation of consciousness and the pursuit of dis-alienation’. In his 1948 play ‘L’Oeil se noie’ (‘The Eye Drowns’), two brothers vie for the affection of a young woman. ‘There is you and me and we sleep on a bed of wild ...”

“... Both the young Morris and the harassed middle-aged socialist looking back on his former self can, she thinks, be recognised here. The stories ‘testify to the constant habits of his ...”

“... relationships. If I yielded to the temptation to dump those bits of paper, I could not maintain my self-respect as a biographer. My father would have been perfectly happy to let anyone see anything he wrote, however intimately he was writing: all was grist to Clio’s mill. But I have to take a broader view. Probably 95 per cent of the material poses no ...”

“... This whole rich and intriguing book leads, in the end, to two melancholy reflections. The self-conscious opponents of mock-traditionalism – the ‘modernists’ of post-1900, with all their hygiene and ultra-rationalism – cannot, now, claim the easy triumph which they once foresaw; and History, as a university subject, really stems from the world ...”

“... that might otherwise never carry. Botham’s ability is unquestioned, and allied to a massive self-confidence, the overwhelming desire to beat even his children at tiddlywinks, and a belief in his own indestructibility, it becomes formidable. Anyone who can bring the Stock Exchange to a standstill doesn’t need the media to make him a superstar. His ...”

“... and unusual. It is ironic that historians of 18th-century England – only too prone to attribute self-interest to their more gentrified high or low-political protagonists – normally approach the more modest adherents of radicalism in a spirit of piety. Those who protest are almost always invested with an ingenuous zeal for political reform; they are even ...”

“... among those many who, at public functions, have encountered the Queen herself, there is the self-satisfied, would-be grudging admission that she too is marvellous: attractive, well-briefed, small and human. In all this, the popularity of Prince Charles is very high, and seems likely to remain so. Moreover, among women there is the Mastroiani syndrome ...”

“... its earliest past. The deadening effect of the jargon in which the heretical doctrine of ‘self-management’ is often formulated by aging exponents of a former orthodoxy is not wholly eradicated by the considerable success of the policy in practice. Yugoslavia’s finest writer, the former Party hard-liner Milovan Djilas, though free to attend and ...”

“... poor, for whom poor relief had to be organised on a national scale. This state of affairs was self-perpetuating. Without education it was virtually impossible to move upwards socially, but the poor could not afford to educate their children. It is therefore misleading to speak of ‘the indifference to formal schooling found in many sectors of the ...”