“... Summaries of books read: The Interpretation of Dreams, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, The Self and Others. All incredibly tidy, with underlinings in red. And exploding flowers and nudie ladies stuck on the inside cover, as if in illustration of The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, which Carter would have been working on at the time. What ...”

“... in a very feminine way and loaf with the other sissies.’ In art school, when asked to make a self-portrait, he depicted himself as a girl ‘with Shirley Temple ringlets’. Pittsburgh was not a good place to be gay. In 1948 the police set up a Morals Squad with a mission ‘to arrest gay men’. In 1951, ‘Pennsylvania’s maximum sentence for sodomy ...”

“... would become legendary (the best account is given by Adrienne Rich). And although she never self-identified as Jewish, being Jewish is something with which she was always identified. As Ettinger puts it, ‘she represented a nation the Germans considered inferior and a race that offended their sensibilities.’ None of that was altered – in many ways ...”

“... and 6 or 7 per cent of the workforce. Perhaps there are still Brexiters who think that being a self-serving annex outside the union – leaning in, like Switzerland, or a member of the EEA, like Norway – would see off EU migration. But even if their absolute intakes are lower, Switzerland and Norway have higher numbers of EU immigrants per head of ...”

“... media is becoming more and more comprehensive. What is left over, that ownership does not ensure, self-censorship increasingly neuters. The Gleichschaltung of parliament and political parties is, if anything, even more impressive. The presidential party, United Russia, and its assorted allies, with no more specific programme than unconditional support for ...”

“... have, with a few exceptions, internalised norms which prevent dispassionate analysis and induce self-censorship, as well as a very shallow sort of news presentation. The other is that we have not yet developed a discourse that does anything more than identify with power, despite the dangers of that power in a world which has shrunk so small and become so ...”

“... have them, push to get them, keep the bidding going. Next, John’s pen-and-ink “medallion” self-portrait – Lot 80 [£100-£150] – it’s like a medal, with John in the middle, sitting naked on the floor, with a birthday message to a friend running round the edge; it’s very small, on India paper. It was a sort of birthday card John drew for a ...”

“... Henry Crawford’s complacent comment in Mansfield Park – when he deplored the notion of a self-satisfied ‘taste’ for poetry, as if for ‘Frontiniac or sherry’. All this is crude stuff, of course, compared to the way Shakespeare insensibly entered into the minds and the style of Coleridge and Hazlitt, helped in both cases by the influence of ...”

“... element provides next to no restraint on the politician’s standing inclination to mistake self-interest for the national interest, and that ‘confidentiality’ has become a cloak for a political and administrative unwillingness to answer to the wretched public. The transformation of public attitudes effected by the activities of Mrs Thatcher and Sir ...”

“... their stricken Jehovah, bed-ridden judge of their inadequacies. They suffer from introspection and self-doubt, and their efforts, pathetic or comical, lose the name of action. Father Bosco, a reluctant contender, meditates the possibility of turning the hotel into a haven for elderly priests; Joey buys himself a motor-boat, and an island from which to take a ...”

“... the eye, the wish to be first with assurances, the eager glint of the spectacles, the unstoppable self-regard in the guise of self-deprecation ... Kenneth Widmerpool! Adjustments made for the Wykehamist rather than the Eton style (Gaitskell, too, had been at Winchester), it has the tone of the power-votary and ...”

“... to a divorced wife. But children, as property and pleasure (and as that means of reflecting on the self, and of finding the self utterly absorbing to its owner, that Family, Sex and Marriage delineated) are not present in the argument here. Stone has asked the question that historians are paid to ask: how did we get to be ...”

“... because they were Irish and because they were financially more secure than Taylor). A tough, self-made businessman and gambler, who won £27,000 in one night in 1963 playing poker on a commission basis, Taylor is at another level an embodiment of many of the virtues Mrs Thatcher is prone to recommend: ...”

“... this is a notion that scholars are inclined to dismiss as laxly belletristic or ignominiously self-sparing: by their nature they are drawn towards the ideal of ‘completeness’. ‘It is limitation,’ Goethe said (even Goethe!), ‘that makes the poet, the artist, the man.’ He is also reported as saying that for him the main thing was always to make ...”

“... Hoff’ or, with lewd intent, ‘Thos Off’. He was frightened by the printed word ‘self-abuse’, since the slang expression ‘tossing off’, was so harmless and humorous. ‘Why is is that giving a word to something invariably transforms it, usually into something awful? (“God” provides a most striking case in point.)’ He is a skilful ...”