“... The book discusses the relationship between ‘the star’ and ‘the fan’, the critic being a self-conscious version of the latter. Lawrence considers how we read a performance, a face, but more how we respond to it. Clift is the test case for her arguments, and given the complexities of his career and fame, he proves to be a very good one. In his first ...”

“... isn’t, properly speaking, something that happens to us. It is, rather, the nullification of the self as experiencing subject. How then can death be a bad thing for the person who dies? What is there to be afraid of? We tend to speak of ‘the fear of death’ as if it were a single particular thing, but that is to obscure the diverse terrors death ...”

“... Pacifists​ are rare. Most people believe that lethal violence may be used in self-defence, or the defence of others, against potentially lethal threats. Military action is justified by a collective institutional version of this basic human right, which sets an outer limit on the right to life. Lethal aggressors who cannot be stopped by lesser means are liable to lethal attack, and this does not violate their right to life so long as they remain a threat ...”

“... same pattern: Carrère takes a character or set of characters and through lengthy digressions and self-reflection finds something both personal and universal in their struggles. He likes to call his books ‘non-fiction novels’ and cites In Cold Blood as his inspiration. But Truman Capote, who used the term himself, always stressed the author’s ...”

“... well as a transcendental aspect. ‘For Lawrence,’ Jacques Berthoud speculates valiantly, ‘the self has a centre, which is the subjective life of the body, and a circumference, which is the outgoing life of the mind.’3 Lawrence felt that mind and body do not settle into a fixed relation, but rather interfere constantly in each other’s designs. In ...”

“... Despite all its limitations and ambiguities, the Declaration of Principles for Palestinian self-government in Gaza and Jericho marked a major breakthrough in the conflict between Arabs and Jews in Palestine. In one stunning move, Arafat and Rabin have redrawn the geopolitical map of the region. The Arab-Israeli divide was one not merely between Israel and the neighbouring Arab states, but also between Jewish and Palestinian nationalism ...”

“... government never moved too far out of contact with the governed and that the masses would grow in self-reliance. Society would then be in every respect self-governing: it would spontaneously generate its own orderliness, and government’s role would diminish almost to vanishing point. Between 1868 and 1900 the smallest ...”

“... Vox is also profoundly erotic. For Baker, an author fantastically alert to ‘the whole problem of self-repetition and self-influence’, both form and content are a departure. His three previous books had approached ever nearer to autobiography, as though taking literally Nabokov’s dictum that writing is ‘a gradually ...”

“... rather maddening. As revealed in his letters he comes across to me as vain, attitudinising and self-dramatising, self-obsessed yet – to the very end – with very little in the way of self-knowledge. I can see there must be something wrong with this reaction, and for the good reason ...”

“... poetics. The Maximus Poems can he read as a massive attempt to heal what Olson saw as the fatal self-contradiction that fissures The Cantos: how, Olson ponders, could Pound be ‘in language and form as forward, as much the revolutionist as Lenin’, while in political, social and economic matters he was ‘as retrogressive as the Czar’? Olson’s own ...”

“... because that is a way of taking the story back from her subject, whose ‘mastery of the art of self-exposure’ was of course legendary. Brightman finds herself in the rather odd situation of deploring the prominence of the ‘Life’, of wanting almost to drape it in shadows, make it private, but having to settle for exposing the over-exposure – ‘Her ...”

“... since Descartes has accompanied scientific and material progress. Chase’s friend Eastman, the self-confident editor of the Lin Tin Bulletin, warns him of these dangers when Chase announces his plan to learn Chinese. Chase will lose all the formative influences (good and bad) that have fashioned his self, since they, and ...”

“... refrigerator in preference to the presumably more life-affirming salmon-pink or pale green. Such a self-confirming closed circle of biographical method does not do justice either to Arbus’s work or, indeed, to her recurrent depressions. But Sartre’s to-be-famous children differ from the subject of this biography in one very evident particular: ‘faux ...”

“... of Sennowe Park for Thomas Cook’s grandson. These houses were for social advancement, self-indulgence and conspicuous consumption, where display meant more than beauty, opulence was preferred to taste, and wealth mattered more than lineage. Harold Nicolson explained: Edwardians were vulgar to a degree. They lacked style. They possessed only the ...”

“... the sign of a primitive culture, we – this would seem to imply – have the novel; and the more self-consciously civilised among novelists have sometimes been anxious to disclaim the form’s own origins. As E.M. Forster wearily put it, ‘Yes – oh dear yes – the novel tells a story.’ But storytelling will outlive the novel, and it is also elemental ...”