“... in a few hands. Capitalism has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’. Capitalism has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that ...”

“... the book being translated, omitted because it dealt with the 1968 student unrest in Paris (though self-censorship did nothing to pre-empt censorship from outside), in which the author argued that groups act as an amplifier of individual possibility, so that some crowds loot, rape and murder, while others display a level of heroism inaccessible to any single ...”

“... that we shall work out a Britain in the 1970s which does not need make-believe to bolster its self-respect … This is Britain’s worldwide role, no less than that of France or Germany, to be herself genuinely and fearlessly, in the Europe and the world of the 1970s.’ More striking still, he now believed that the instinctive resistance of the British ...”

“... or rather he agrees with Freud, who told him: ‘Everything is biographical and everything is a self-portrait.’ Feaver has a vivid sense of the sheer amount of time Freud spent in the studio and the determination and independence of mind that kept him charged. He is alert to the idea that the energy Freud spent on his work spilled over into the ...”

“... Value. Best buy. Making the best of it. Look on the bright side. Spin doctors, post-literate and self-deceiving, had no use for subtlety. Best Value. They hammered the tag into their inelegant, over-designed freebies. These glossy publications, political correctness in all its strident banality, existed to sell the lie. Best Value. Government-sponsored ...”

“... Other Rooms (1948), The Grass Harp (1951) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958). Even at 21, he took self-conscious care of his sentences. ‘In the falling quiet,’ he could write, ‘there was no earth or sky, only snow lifting in the wind, frosting the window glass, chilling the rooms, deadening and hushing the city.’ At 22, in a story called ‘The ...”

“... The century had not yet turned and high society still confined itself to the minutiae of dynastic self-perpetuation. In playing hostess to the artists, Misia was being more bohemian than grand. But she was a grand enough bohemian. She could give the artists a deep draught of luxury. She would probably have aroused the same sense of stylish comfort even if she ...”

“... masque Alfred by Thomas Arne and James Thomson. The performance was part of a campaign by the self-styled Patriots to whip up support for the war against Spain. King Alfred was chosen as the subject as the purported founder of the British Navy, though there are other contenders for the title, including Henry VIII, Good Queen Bess (the ...”

“... a technique which enabled Olivier, as so often on the stage, to hide in the spotlight. Promising a self-portrait, he painted across his own features a Kathakali mask of violent emotions, the grinning red, black and silver face of a tormented demon. This, his text declared with great cries of guilt, was the real Olivier: but what readers took in primarily was ...”

“... outset of his illness, the King starts to ‘harp on about America’ it is a sign that the royal self-control is beginning to break down. Fox was temperamentally drawn to the colonists, Pitt less so but neither was in sympathy with the King’s view that the colonies were an inalienable estate and part of his royal patrimony. The King’s attitude has echoes ...”

“... the war had been caused by competing capitalist empires seemed to these bright young men and women self-evident. Stalin’s terror and the Gulag were still far in the future, or unknown in the West. If Sorge had a trade at all, it was, like Philby’s, journalism; the subject that really interested him was politics. In November 1918, he did his best to bring ...”

“... Xerxes begins with a famous largo, ‘Shade as it never was’ (Ombra mai fu), sung by the self-same King of Kings to his beloved: a plane tree. Aelian, a collector of amazing historical facts, provides the fullest account of this bizarre episode: That Xerxes fellow was a clown … he was slavishly devoted to a plane tree, as if the tree was something ...”

“... back beyond the white-bearded maker of images of luxuriousness to the wild-man-of-art shown in the self-portrait of 1906 and to be reminded that – as one soon learns from the letters he wrote to his son Pierre in the 1930s and 1940s (quoted in John Russell’s Matisse: Father and Son) – even the old Matisse was far from the calm, masterful presence one ...”

“... what the rest of us daily endure. The disparity between her professed fearlessness and her actual self-protective closetedness strikes a questioning footnote that is the one blot on her otherwise brilliant career.’I have to say I could never figure her out on this touchy subject – though we did talk about it. Her usual line (indignant and aggrieved) was ...”

“... though he always claimed Darwin as a major influence), Mill, Comte, Marcus Aurelius. A pattern of self-education, ravenous and stringent, had begun. In London for five years from 1862, Hardy attended French classes at King’s College, and went daily for a time to the National Gallery to study a selected painter or painting. His Literary Notebooks, which have ...”