“... wasn’t right. It was Marilyn’s misfortune to think that serious acting could save her from self-doubt. In fact it only exacerbated it. The Girl, though certainly choking and limiting as a character, was something she knew about, and it remained for her a very special and individual invention. But Learning is bigger and better than any other biographer ...”

“... Fitzgerald makes a good case for seeing her as two people: as Miss Lotti, the parasol-carrying, self-effacing homebody, who broke with Harland because Oscar Wilde’s trial besmirched the Yellow Book’s reputation, and as Charlotte Mew, the poet and headbanger, who fell for Harland’s assistant Ella d’Arcy, and pursued her to Paris. For two months in ...”

“... a study that uses both female writers and characters to explore the tensions between a woman’s self-realisation and her fulfilment through love. Like George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett seems to have been a happy exception to Blake’s general rule – having won fame as an artist and the devoted support of a lover as well. Yet the conflicts that both women ...”

“... coyote was, without any clothes or house or books or anything, with nothing but his own naked self to pay his way with, and risking his life so cheerfully – and losing it – just to see if he could pick up a meal near the hotel. He was doing his coyote-business like a hero, and you must do your boy-business, and I my man-business bravely too, or else ...”

“... had done a classic job. It was a time when he slept badly, was nervous and irritable. His self-confidence was shaken. Should he try to make a mark in London literary circles? No, he detested the log-rolling and backbiting. Should he become more of a courtier and build on his ode sung at the Coronation of Edward VII (or rather, as he observed, not ...”

“... was writing, and indeed living, à rebours, under the threat of insanity and in the dark thrill of self-inflicted frustration. The split could not be concealed indefinitely, and by the 1920s her appearance had altered, and shocked. ‘Her wind-blown gray hair, her startled gray eyes, her thin white face, belonged to a reluctant visitor from another ...”

“... rather than eviction. If this tactic becomes more wholehearted, we get a full-fledged alternative self, as with Kipling’s soldier (‘I heard a beggar squealin’ out for quarter as he ran/and I thought I knew the voice and it was me’). It is obvious, too, as both Davidson and Pears argue, that whatever is paradoxical about these concepts is intrinsic to ...”

“... knowledge almost, rather than opinion. Brilliantly expounded, with cracking pace and unflappable self-confidence, the book is a mine of information and an indispensable primer to anyone who comes to the subject fresh and ready to make a new conquest, just as it is an extraordinarily adept configuration of the field for those who may come to the subject weary ...”

“... were the qualities she most respected, the same qualities that characterised her own noble life of self-deprivation. What moved Marianne North in middle age to begin her succession of solitary journeys that was to extend over nearly fifteen years, from 1871 to 1885, and to take her to Canada and the United States, Jamaica, South ...”

“... their subjects to believe that public policy is too complex or too boring a matter for ordinary self-respecting citizens to bother with: better to leave it in the benevolent, efficient hands of the technocrats. The avant-garde encourages this belief when it holds the mirror up to nature and reveals all the standard items in the avant-garde ...”

“... accord to the disasters of their waking lives. Coleridge, with what has to be called a magnificent self-importance, believed that the powers that had carried him through the darkness were also the reasons why he and his kind should be accorded a legislative position within the constitutional apparatus of the state. A number of distinct currents of feeling ...”

“... between a radical critique of the spurious ‘progressiveness’ of the cult of spontaneity and self-expression in literature teaching, and a surely exaggerated fear that the entire British literary tradition is so savagely and unfailingly repressive in its political outlook that radical intellectuals might do best to shield the working classes from any ...”

“... which thread the book together, it is difficult in the end not to feel that Lelyveld, for all his self-effacement, emerges as the hero of his own book. Inevitably, his own liberal prejudices shine through, so that, for all his gentle humanity, most of the whites interviewed come across as bigots, fools or monsters. And indeed many of them are just that. But ...”

“... curiously uncertain, alternating between major and brutal police action and mere containment. The self-constituted body of community leaders called the Committee of Ten, which eventually emerged to conduct negotiations, was arrested, then released and allowed to function. The action in Soweto spread to townships in other parts of the country, particularly in ...”

“... of a poem. ‘These were strange requests, coming from someone who had made contemporary poets self-conscious about their crudities, afraid to rhyme “bone” with “stone”, or to go umpty-umpty-um. Marianne was doing her best, one saw, to go umpty-umpty-um when she sensed that La Fontaine had gone that way, but it seemed to be almost – I use the ...”