“... someone else’s. The double may serve as a friend or as an enemy, just as the romantic ‘second self’ may be more or less the same as the first, or very different. Lennon, it turns out, was experienced as a double by a person whom he did not know, but who loved and hated him. Such are the hazards of stardom.He was deserted, to different degrees, by both ...”

“... Hammond with Alexander’s emotional life, which was certainly of deep concern to Alexander: his self-image was at the core of his achievement. His conclusions on this matter (including those about the Ammon oracle) seem, in the light of all the evidence, to be essentially true. Like Hammond, he disposes crisply of the untenable theory that Alexander was an ...”

“... passionate, and suggests that when she does not shake hands it is because she is ‘so erotically self-conscious that she had considered beforehand how important and therefore how compromising to herself is the touch of a man whose eyes are in his fingers’. There were times in the book when I found myself longing for this creepy sexual magic of the blind to ...”

“... and equals. The mercurial Tsar, ‘great-hearted’, Napoleon-obsessed, religious fanatic and self-styled military genius, haunted by the somewhat dubious circumstances of his succession to Mad Tsar Paul in 1801, was everything by fits and nothing for long. Small wonder Barclay never mastered Alexander’s shifting moods. Who did? Usually he was ...”

“... or not we subscribe to notions of the moral economy of rioters, one cannot but be struck by the self-discipline both of the rioters and of their victims. It would he hard to add to Macfarlane’s list of scholars who have written (very impressionistically) of the lawlessness of the English countryside: it would be easy to swamp it with counter-examples. Why ...”

“... with desire’, for another free one. The famous Hotel du Lac has another writer and self-acknowledged loser, this time Edith: as a tortoise, she knows that hares win. The setting is an expensive hotel, with more grotesque and more or less free ones. Edith is there because she disgraced herself by leaving an unsuitable fiancé at the registry ...”

“... and that is probably Powell’s intention, for it later turns out that the name was either self-invented or perhaps bestowed by an ambitious grandmother, who is determined the girl shall be a success in life, preferably as a ballet dancer, for which she shows remarkable aptitude. Henchman is a monster, an unusual specimen of a genre by which Powell has ...”

“... fees – whoosh! – all automatic. And there’s plenty left in the bank to buy burglar bars and self-defence items. Plenty left for me and the missus if you work for the Administration. Some people may not like it, but boy oh boy just look at this suit, man – Savile Row, Germiston. And these shoes – Italian, made in Boksburg. And this tie! Everything of ...”

“... when he was in his early twenties that showed signs of ‘callous insensitiveness’. He was a self-loather on principle; it did not reduce his sense of superiority. Ms Secrest says that her biography of Clark is not ‘authorised’, which means that he never gave her written permission to quote directly from his letters and diaries. If she had been ...”

“... and that there are specifiable ‘occasions of guilt’ which account for the self-torments he went through. How much Byron himself wanted this to be the case his narrative poems reveal plainly enough: they reveal also just how much he wanted to believe, and wanted others to believe, that he was both the possessor of and possessed by a ...”

“... Poetry should be worked at every day and thought about constantly. I learnt that kind of creative self-discipline at Art School and that’s something I’ll always be grateful for. I feel uneasy as I write these things, though. I also remember all the talking I did there. How I became good at providing pat and horribly pseud statements about my ...”

“... mention in the essay contest on the theme of ‘The American Boy’. His entry is naively self-revealing: the typical American boy is not fearful of dangers. He should be able to go out into the country and drink raw milk. Likewise he should traverse the hills and valleys of the city. If he is Jewish he should say so. The 1940s in fact hold a ...”

“... while yet. Although Mr Haughey’s tactic is premised on the belief that the Agreement is bound to self-destruct and that he will be able to capitalise politically on the resulting chaos, he must nonetheless be anxious about the wedge which has been driven between his party and the SDLP. The SDLP encouraged Dail bipartisanship on the Northern question, because ...”

“... that no analogy between a natural cycle and man’s life is very satisfactory, since man, in his self-consciousness, is all too aware that, for him, the cycle will not start again. All of the great commonplaces on this subject, from ‘As the generations of leaves, so are the generations of men’ to ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’, depend for their ...”

“... detail. There is much easy satire of literary biography, particularly of the stuffily myopic and self-important ‘Definitive Life’ variety. Jeffrey tells us everything: Edwin’s infant sounds are listed (for three months and six); so, too, his first movements, as recorded in his father’s My Story: A Baby Record; the numerous passages of verse and prose ...”