“... recourse throughout the letters to earlier usages, which are also reflections on an earlier self.His writing to Hale coincided with his acquiring a room in Russell Square – ‘and I need not see secretaries or visitors unless I want to.’ A year later he was prompted to recall wrathfully how long it had taken to reach this small ledge of ...”

“... resist it. The party’s last real leader, Enrico Berlinguer, personified austere contempt for the self-indulgence and infantilism of the new universe of cultural and material consumption. After he had gone, the step from unbending refusal to gushing capitulation was a short one – Walter Veltroni coming to resemble a beaming picture-card out of the ...”

“... as a target – was this terrorism? If the West’s answer is that this was not terrorism, it was self-defence – then we must think to adopt this definition too.’ This was said to me by a leading Islamist in Beirut a few days ago. He was making a point, but behind his rhetorical question plainly lies the deeper issue of what the Gaza violence will signify ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... enough, in 1979, he had bought the Ritz Hotel in Paris. But the Ritz was a bauble, an unprofitable self-indulgence. Certainly al-Fayed was reckoned to be small-time by global tycoons like Tiny Rowland, who, when he met al-Fayed, had been refused permission to acquire Harrods by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission. Hoping to have this decision rescinded at ...”

“... command. The marks of fear were all there, but fear as a gift, as a rare, ironic skin around the self, the unprotected soul was now ready to speak the bitter truth. None of us had ever heard anything like it. I shall soon be quite dead at last in spite of all. Perhaps next month. Then it will be the month of April or of May. For the year is still young, a ...”

“... books, Firbank’s are in fact technically quite distinct from one another, responses to exacting self-imposed challenges. Vainglory, much Firbank’s longest book, has the characteristic personal warmth of a certain kind of first novel, a confidence, untested but justified, in making a private world public, with a bold declaration of particular interests and ...”

“... just before or just after the Second World War. Everything suggests that light regulation or self-regulation of financial institutions never works. In the General Theory, Keynes said he expected the state increasingly to determine the patterns of investment because the state, unlike everyone else, can take the long view. Keynes went further than we would ...”

“... place after a relatively short interval. Earlier studies had ‘focused only on adults who had self-identified as gay/lesbian/bisexual back in the 1970s and 1980s’, whereas she wanted to find out about women who were coming out now, women who had ‘grown up with much greater exposure to ideas about same-sex sexuality than had previous ...”

“... Court decisions challenging the legality of the Musharraf regime had restored the country’s self-respect. But the judges were not popular in the United States or Euroland, where elite opinion was obsessed with occupation and war. For defending the civil rights of the poor, the chief justice was referred to in the Guardian as a ‘judicial ...”

“... became Marilyn Monroe. Doris Kappelhoff became Doris Day, who then became Clara Bixby, a third self. You can look at the icon of Doris Day and at the woman known as Clara Bixby, but not at the same time. There are some sunny elements to her childhood: a beloved older brother, an extended family in a tight-knit German-American neighbourhood, an Uncle ...”

“... of the plays and are illustrated with Gray’s own artwork, usually topped and tailed by (self-) critical essays and full of polemic. Chunks of a political pamphlet will turn up a few years later, unaltered, in a book of short stories. What I believed, on my first reading, to be a brilliant piece of fiction – ‘A Report to the Trustees of the ...”

“... fondness for the countryside. Léger was perceptive enough to see the pretensions, but also the self-control, of the man on the bicycle ‘scrupulously obeying the laws of perspective’, as he put it. Le Corbusier was as careful about his appearance as he was about his pronouncements: both were a means to an end. The trademark circular spectacles (he was ...”