“... own history). When Sassoon was invited by Dunn to contribute, he responded first by writing a long self-analytical poem, ‘A Footnote on the War: (On Being Asked to Contribute to a Regimental History)’, and decided he must refuse; then he changed his mind and, drawing on his diaries, sent Dunn a 12-page account which appears as a separate chapter (and which ...”

“... Bouncing through McAleer’s book are also puns that would be turned down by most self-respecting Christmas crackers. Our author is, to put it simply, a bit of a clown. The publishers refer to his ‘personal voice’, but there are really two voices, and the reader is never quite sure which McAleer will turn up. There is the dandified one who ...”

“... the Frankfurt refugees retreated into ‘deeper isolation’; they suffered from ‘intellectual self-doubt, escapism and élitism’. ‘A lack of interest on the part of the Institute’s core group in becoming integrated’ explains their ‘shattered lives’, writes Krohn, alluding to the subtitle of Adorno’s Minima Moralia. Even The Authoritarian ...”

“... an apparatus for imagining, the I Ching facilitates a confrontation between a presentday self and an ancient, randomly chosen Other, bringing a personal question, full of hope, fear and ignorance, face to face with the enigmatic, poetically dense, open-ended interpretation of an abstract hexagram. The notion that something new, interesting and ...”

“... Terry eases himself down a rung or two, with a genial shrug. Nothing impinges on his rock-solid self-esteem. His DIY, his annual holiday at Butlin’s, the benign companionship of Shirley, his ‘small garden big enough to sit in but not too big to be a problem to look after’: these are the blessings Terry counts, repeatedly. ‘Call me unpretentious but ...”

“... Walter Sickert’s review of the Pennells’ Life of Whistler: ‘Now back in London after his self-imposed exile in France, Sickert realised Whistler’s worst fears and became “the pupil who would sell the soul of his master”. He savaged not only Whistler but, predictably, the Pennells as well ... Sickert continued to undermine Whistler’s ...”

“... dodgers, cheeky chappies of one sort or another. On match days it’s like a great army of the self-employed. Somebody once reckoned that if you shouted ‘Taxi!’ at the Lane about a third of the West Stand would want to know ‘Where to?’ And if you were to yell ‘VAT’ another third would start making for the exits. You could spend all day showing ...”

“... communes, comes across as a highly practical man, more pragmatic and less inclined to anguished self-examination than many of the Tolstoyans. Hand-farming, for example, went a bit too far for Mazurin. His practical qualities kept the two communes afloat and no doubt had something to do with his survival after 1936. Yet even Mazurin had his spiritual ...”

“... and blaming others. Even the massacre at Chumi Shengo seems not to have occasioned any direct self-questioning. Instead, as he was leaving Lhasa to return to India, Younghusband had an intense mystical experience, clearly purificatory in nature, in which he was seized by a tremendous ‘sense of elation and goodwill’, and knew with absolute certainty ...”

“... Schiller and penned love poems, must have asked ‘Why jellyfish?’ And he must have led her self-importantly from these pulsing ‘nastinesses’ to the great problem of existence, contrasting his tiny truths of creation with the sandcastle sophistries for which men were willing to die. The tiny truths were real bricks which would build a palatial ...”

“... magical; and that play doesn’t preclude pain or historical sense. Realism could be allusive and self-constructing; we might believe in it because it was made up. When Saramago speaks, in The Stone Raft, of the ‘persistent indifference’ which supposedly separates the dead from the rest of humanity, he goes on mischievously to evoke his own earlier ...”

“... de Beauvoir writes: ‘There was one book in which I believed I had caught a glimpse of my future self: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott ... I identified passionately with Jo, the intellectual ... She wrote; in order to imitate her more completely, I composed two or three short stories.’ What Jean-Paul Sartre thought of Little Women has gone ...”

“... Great Gatsby, may be ‘an unbroken series of successful gestures’. It’s a wrong-headed and self-punishing proposition. Both Gatsby and The Last Tycoon are novels which dream of such a personality, but they tell us finally, as Fitzgerald’s life does, that personality can be made of failure too, that a broken series of anything like successful gestures ...”

“... Morris was to be haunted by such contradictions throughout his life. There wasn’t much socialist self-management in his workshops, and while he himself was haranguing striking cotton workers in Lancashire, his craftsmen back home were producing woven silk velvet for £10 a yard. After two trips to Iceland in the 1870s, which confirmed his enthusiasm for ...”

“... get off the ground, had become an astonishing compulsion; nowhere more so than in France, the self-styled nursery of flight. In the year of Blériot the Count de Lambert flew over Paris and circled the Eiffel Tower at 300 metres. If King Kong had climbed the Tower Parisians could not have been more excited. It is true that Santos-Dumont had done the same ...”