“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sits composedly, if not exactly decorously (there is, in her look, a suggestion of the cheerful, self-willed schoolgirl) in front of a background of dark foliage dotted with pinks, columbines and butterflies. There are preparatory drawings for scenes of romantic chivalry: one of the now sadly battered frescos in the series illustrating Arthurian legends ...”

“... accused the HIPJ of being too tolerant of anti-semitism. He now went undercover as part of a self-appointed effort to monitor anti-semitism on campus. In one posting, for example, he referred to Israel as the ‘AshkeNAZI state’. Incidents of this kind, which are becoming commonplace on American campuses, reflect a wider determination to ...”

“... heavily inked etchings. Rodin himself approved of these explorations of light, angles and detail. Self-expression in the photography of sculpture can be intrusive. In Rodin’s case it is a collaboration, as tricky but sometimes as successful as the setting of words to music. Edward Steichen got in early with his photograph of Rodin and The Thinker, both in ...”

“... but their refusal to accept that they are in the presence of art minimises the debilitating self-importance a gallery exhibition tends to force on even the most subversive work. The new Tate Modern display does well, for example, by videos. In one, made by Gary Hill in 1994, you see his young daughter Anastasia reading from Wittgenstein’s Remarks on ...”

“... as a mood. Landscape painting in Russia had become a vehicle for national pride and national self-examination. In an essay in the Royal Academy catalogue Yevgenia Petrova suggests that ‘sacralisation of art is something peculiar perhaps to the Russian mentality,’ and speculates that art of all sorts took the place of the pulpit and debating chamber ...”

“... Browse and Delbanco in the last year of her life was a critical and financial success. But the self-confidence that carried her forward, undistracted by the strong international currents that broke the flow of other careers, seems to have been sustained by attachment to her native place. Juxtapositions are another pleasure of work seen in a provincial ...”

“... up and dispersed in space. Yet 6, from 2017-18, is a lattice of canals or rivers that has become self-involved and confused, its meanders orphaned into oxbow lakes. As the drawings scaled up, a storm of text arrived. Look closely at the scalpelled borders where the works have been taken apart and put back together. They bristle on either side with ...”

“... changed much, but Louis has, as we learn from his first monologue in this time and place. He is a self-absorbed maniac and would-be serial killer, convinced that his failure to have had any sort of relation with a girl or a woman is a fault of that sex and needs to be avenged. He picks Gabrielle as his target, the woman who will pay for the perceived crimes ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”