“... When Herzog refuses, Ganna implies that she and he don’t get on, not because they’re too self-absorbed to listen to each other, but because they possess two different shades of literary soul, hers bohemian, his neat, Austrian and aspirational: ‘Bitterly, she called me a bourgeois who didn’t have the courage to try out in his life what he was ...”

“... say, but they said it was about time. I was vice-president of my class and happy to be my real self.’ Maasch’s organisation has published an advice pamphlet for trans teens: there are tips for transgirls on selecting the right bra, and information for transboys on binders and packers; everyone wants to know how to come out to friends. But the ...”

“... and whose final torrential performances might be heard as a compulsive search for a way out of a self-generated impasse). These twinned pictures aren’t the only example in photography of this kind of doubling-up. In the same year Philip Jones Griffiths and Larry Burrows made almost identical photographs of a dying Vietnamese woman lying in a road in Saigon ...”

“... Party. When history is used for the purposes of legitimation, it cannot support any substantial self-critique. The Chinese learned the lesson of Gorbachev’s failure: full recognition of the ‘founding crimes’ brings the entire system down: they must be disavowed. True, some Maoist ‘excesses’ and ‘errors’ were denounced (the Great Leap Forward ...”

“... hid all her life, so that even as she stripped, she remained entirely obscure behind a screen of self-invention. Gypsy, she writes, ‘came to interest me more and I came to like her less.’ Without the performance, she is all ambition and lies; just as without all the marabou fans, she is just a naked lady with a better than average pair of ...”

“... to this place to find something, to connect with something lost, to reunite if not with my whole self, then with a piece of it. What I’ve discovered is that this thing is not here. In fact, it is nowhere. I have learned that my name is not my name. It seems you all know me and nothing could be further from the truth and yet you know me better than I know ...”

“... of Winston Churchill, evidence for repressed homosexuality includes narcissism, exhibitionism, self-consciousness about ‘his short and hairless body’ and a passion for silk underwear. Oh, and he got on with Noël Coward. In his foreword, Matthew Parris insists that ‘Bloch is very, very careful to distinguish between rumour, report and ...”

“... Soviets – he wrote: I see another guarantee for Russia’s future: the fact that it is led by a self-confident, firm government driven by great political ideals … Their worldview is unacceptable to me. And yet slowly and unsurely the hope awakens in me that they will lead the Russian people, perhaps against its will, down the right path to a sure goal and ...”

“... make any friends doing so. For six years, August, Siri and their children kicked around Europe in self-imposed exile, with 21 changes of residence and not a little discomfort. Although by now he had many fans and enough books and stage productions to make him famous, Strindberg still had difficulties with publishers and theatres, not to mention constant ...”

“... stance was not that of a historian so much as a ‘public intellectual’, a brilliant enemy of self-delusion garnished with theoretical jargon, with the short temper of the natural polemicist, an independent and fearless critical commentator on world affairs. He seemed all the more original and radical for having been a fairly orthodox defender of the ...”

“... a troubling pleasure to be got from well-made sentences about unspeakable acts. The North Water is self-consciously literary, thick with allusions to other books: Moby-Dick, obviously (Sumner is less Ishmael than Ahab by the time he limps off across the ice in pursuit of a white bear); Conrad (there’s something of Lord Jim about Sumner, trying to redeem his ...”

“... it occurred ‘before daybreak on a Sunday, probably on 9 April, AD 30’. But this exactitude is self-defeating, because it stands alone with nothing else chronologically labelled to give it validity. Vermes mentions the Jewish martyrs of the Maccabean period, men who died for the Torah and were presumed, like modern suicide bombers, to receive a heavenly ...”

“... the narrator’s family in A la Recherche, are dealt with purely as a routine expression of Jewish self-hatred. ‘This distancing, this critical glance cast upon one’s own kind,’ Bloch-Dano writes, ‘is a well-known phenomenon: the difficulty of seeing oneself reflected in the gaze of others.’ True enough, but it doesn’t really explain the baroque ...”

“... the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of ...”

“... country or in a Cambridge college, or travelling a lot, he achieved such public eminence. Always self-deprecating, he nevertheless understood his own stature; in his commonplace book he privately compared his powers with those of other writers, including Eliot, and judged himself superior. It must be allowed that he had many admiring friends, and his name ...”