“... I care about artificial black & white “success” if I haven’t got a soul but my own perplexed self to talk to? God, Davy, I can’t say how much I miss you.’ In her next letters to Ann, she had bucked up, and described visiting a medical student at Yale, Dick Norton, who became the model for Buddy Willard in The Bell Jar. ‘Yale junior ...”

“... cataclysmic but still comprehensible within the Enlightenment tradition of universal reason and a self-conscious humanism; they were a chapter in the long history of the heart at its darkest: a ‘Holocaust’ for all seasons. At the same time, the ‘Holocaust’ he describes is spectacularly specific. Levi’s genius is not for the grand rhetorical style ...”

“... acknowledge: ‘There is, therefore, a benign possible explanation – that highly educated people self-select into academic jobs – for much of why academia “leans left”.’It would, therefore, require social engineering – of the kind conservatives oppose when it comes to remedying the under-representation of ethnic minority groups – to ensure that ...”

“... and his illusions about Chiang and the GMD, for five days he had to abase himself with abject self-criticism for every episode about which he was assailed, and extravagantly celebrate the wisdom of Mao. For Chen, this ordeal gave a foretaste of ‘how extraordinarily abusive a leader Mao would eventually be’ and the dangers to the party and country of ...”

“... modernity are closely linked. Could we imagine something like Birkin’s words, minus the nasty self-righteousness, spoken gently – spoken out of love? For Spurling is right: love is at stake here. And of course the words in question (transposed into an ironic, puzzled, even admiring register) are addressed by Matisse not just to Amélie but to himself ...”

“... original in my ideas, I must live up to expectations.’ Rosa also sent Ricciardi a philosophic self-portrait – the poseur in cavalier ringlets contemplating a skull, as if Russell Brand were to land the role of Hamlet. But composure was not Rosa’s métier. He took fright when the Chigi, butts of his satire, took over the papacy in 1655, sent his ...”

“... in trade unions for four years. In 2012 Moyer-Lee helped found the IWGB in order, as its sometimes self-dramatising, revolutionary red website puts it, to organise ‘the unorganised, the abandoned and the betrayed’. In June, when I first visited the offices, Moyer-Lee told me it already had six hundred members. ‘The vast majority are cleaners, bicycle ...”

“... the hospital for weekends, slapped me for ‘the look on my face’. I can’t bring myself to get self-righteous about it. I think it must have been terrible having someone look at them the way I did. Insolent, uncaring, challenging. And they’d snap. At the time, after telling my father I’d been sacked again, I really didn’t know what my belligerent ...”

“... In one disarming passage he describes capitalism as a ‘a non-violent, civilised mode of material self-enrichment through market exchange’. What makes capitalism toxic is its expansiveness, its relentless colonisation of the rest of society. Drawing on Karl Polanyi, Streeck insists that capitalism destroys its own foundations. It undermines the family units ...”

“... people over another.’ A federation, an association of independent nations or a single state with self-governing minority regions? He never finally decided.His lifelong rival and adversary Roman Dmowski stood for ‘modern, scientific’ nationalism: the exclusive version based on race, force and mass unity that developed in the 19th century. Deeply ...”

“... address what he was avoiding and what he was clinging to – attachments that a life of prayer and self-examination are supposed to make clearer. ‘Never has such devotion been shown by one brother to the memory of another,’ wrote Maisie Ward, Chesterton’s first biographer; ‘never has the greater man exalted the lesser to such a pedestal.’Cecil was a ...”

“... especially since – as Grosskurth herself deftly uses them to show – Libussa was a dominant and self-dramatising person whose own accounts of people and events were often highly coloured. One particular episode is important. In 1908, Libussa informed Melanie that her sister Emilie had been conducting an adulterous affair as well as ruining her husband by ...”

“... might be brought against the ideas he intended to put forward. Perhaps, not so much a mark of self-assurance, it was merely a mannerism to confound his enemies, but it made an impression on me because my consciousness found such a tactic congenial. Otherwise, why remember an incident from a film of so long ago, when scores more are totally ...”

“... cannot be got too black,’ he jotted in his sketchbook in a characteristic spirit of self-exhortation.) The picture is finished off with a varnish that has aged into a rich yellowy-brown: the total effect is sometimes said to resemble an etching, which is true enough, though it resembles something else even more, as Colin Harrison says in his ...”

“... A novel where the time and place of the murder are announced in advance in a newspaper ad. The self-conscious, formalist impulse behind Christie’s work is the explanation for one of the biggest puzzles about her books: why the most popular detective writer of all time had as her principal character a man who is, by general agreement, the worst detective ...”