“... from obscurity to attention, like Blake, Poe, Browning and many others; those he brought to self-attention, like Swinburne, Morris, Burne-Jones; and everyone from Whistler to Yeats – there were many – whose imaginations were shifted or shaped by his ideas and practice. Though not much now remembered, between approximately 1848 and 1912 Rossetti ...”

“... important for the speaker to consider what harm it can do. The second reason is that it promotes self-fulfilment – an aspect, perhaps, of the first reason. The last is that ‘freedom of speech is the lifeblood of a democracy.’ The physiological metaphor is apt because, as Lord Steyn goes on to point out, free speech enables opinion and fact to be ...”

“... rational acts of will, a therapeutic success story and a moral progress, a dietetic project of the self. It speaks from a culture in which it was possible to talk in the same idiom, as Guerrini nicely puts it, about ‘the triangle of food, flesh, and spirit’, and in which medicine addressed all three but did not own the exclusive rights to talk intelligibly ...”

“... fiercely independent sister Alice, Gordon sternly checks herself: ‘Even if these two women were self-sufficient, that does not entirely absolve’ him. ‘Why, when ten and a half thousand letters of Henry James were allowed to survive,’ her opening pages ask portentously, ‘did he make a pact with Fenimore to destroy their correspondence?’ That ...”

“... Voldemort hit him when he was still a baby, and would have killed him but for his mother’s self-sacrificial intervention; the scar functions, like the mark of Cain, to set Harry apart. (The evil upper-form boy Malfoy calls him ‘Scarhead’.)The Family Romance haunts the story of the ugly duckling, raised among scornful ducks until he discovers that ...”

“... a bit ‘like a jockey’. But everybody noticed that Nijinsky had a supernatural-seeming gift for self-transformation. It was a gift so extreme it had always seemed capable of unbalancing his mind. While watching him in Le Spectre de la rose, Cocteau remarked that Nijinsky was like ‘some melancholy, imperious scent’, that ‘evaporates through the window ...”

“... as the collision of a pure spirit and a vulgar one, but Strauss was being his usual pragmatic self: mayors needed to be attended to, even after death. In these years of Strauss’s greatest fame, Mahler, who suffered from the Wagnerian disease of mistaking the personal for the world-historical, began to speak of the insignificance of contemporary musical ...”

“... undoubted ‘pluck’, not courage, which he never had, but an unquestioning belief in his own bad self, whatever it was up to. The greatest irony is that had he been allowed to take the stand at one of the Wilde trials, he would probably not have pretended Greek love was all about education and holding hands – which was why Oscar’s friends kept him away ...”

“... to say that Hunt didn’t possess his own kind of vanity, ‘a little over-bearing, over-weening self-complacency’, as Hazlitt described it. When he and his brother John were sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in 1812 for libelling the Prince Regent, Hunt offered a teasingly serene, not to say Skimpolean face to the public: ‘Our Prosecutors will ...”

“... to have attempted. His earlier writing saw literature and power as locked in reciprocal cycles of self-construction and self-destruction, in which individuals mattered far less than ideological processes. But then he always gave Shakespeare a special place in these processes, and the circulations of power which he found ...”

“... league. I had a paper round. I had a girlfriend. I was obsessed and terrified by my own burgeoning self. I was, in other words, a perfectly normal teenage boy. Which is probably why I went looking for trouble. I’d become a convert at the age of 16 when I attended a rally in London: it was in Central Hall, Westminster, and was led by a man called John ...”

“... in the world of The Plot against America. It is another matter. Politics for the informed but self-absorbed Kepesh is a way of talking about the arrangements of his private life. He is funny, and of course he has a point about sexual freedom. There is a difference between responsible behaviour and the endless, pointless provision of misery for ...”

“... abstraction did not break with the artistic past but preserved its greatest qualities through self-critique. Such ‘Modernist painting’ served, then, not only to bracket other avant-garde practices, which indeed posited a break with tradition (the readymade, constructed sculpture, the found image, collage, photomontage), but also to paper over ...”

“... All three men cast disabused eyes over the ruthless spy chiefs, priggish civil servants and self-seeking diplomats who notice such things about them. And from the ‘calves-foot jelly’, ‘essence of beef’ and ‘breast of chicken from the jar’ fed to the convalescing Leamas to the ‘glass-fronted sentry box with a “Scenes of ...”

“... be stretched to encompass an unwavering air of innocence, combined with an evident capacity for self-delusion and, when it suited him, ruthlessness. Naivety is neither good nor bad in itself, and many famous politicians have had their share of it. But unless Blair, far from being the regular guy as which he likes to project himself, is a hypocrite of ...”