“... heroines are often isolated and bullied by the coarser people around them, but she was too self-aware to stack the deck in favour of the misfit every time. A passing reference to Eleanor’s mother describes her ‘hysterical insistence’ that all the bad things happening to their family were ‘due to malicious, backbiting people on the block who had ...”

“... became a well-known writer under her married name, Winifred Peck). The family ethos was strong, self-mythologising even, and had to do with being ‘brilliantly clever’ – all but ‘poor Ethel’ went to Oxford or Cambridge – and ‘distinguished by alarming honesty, caustic wit, shyness, moral rigour, willpower, oddness and powerful banked-down ...”

“... of government. But this system collapses before the end of the play into something more simple and self-enclosed. ‘The dead do not belong to you,’ Tiresias tells Creon, ‘nor to the gods above.’ There are moments – and death (or more properly decay) is one of them – that belong neither to sacred nor to secular law, but to themselves. Antigone has ...”

“... but he said that if 84 per cent of Iowan Democrats under the age of thirty were supporting a self-declared socialist it was a sign that American high schools weren’t teaching economics properly. In northern Connecticut, Rush Limbaugh occupied multiple frequencies on the AM dial. His voice seems to emanate from the anterior of his nasal cavity and to ...”

“... the orphanic with the orphic; traumatic exposure or isolation is translated into an occasion for self-making or shady pleasure. Smith’s mother died from heart disease in 1919 when she was 16. ‘The last minute when you are dying, that may be a very long time indeed,’ Pompey writes in Novel on Yellow Paper. ‘So now it is all over, it is all over and ...”

“... had the (not) final word on the matter: ‘We do not believe in mock Mussolinis, silly shirts, self-advertising upstarts.’ When war came, Vogue rallied. The October 1939 editorial declared that the magazine would ‘maintain the standards of civilisation’ (and help you find a handbag big enough for a gas mask). ‘We are digging in for a long hard ...”

“... English poetry might very well start’. Opinion about his relation to his age has always been self-divided. He said he had no relation to it. Edmund Wilson wrote in 1938 that the poems ‘went on vibrating for decades’, despite their lethal pastoral of condemned men and suicides, soldiers and doomed lovers, their stopped clock of velleities and arrested ...”

“... still a museum to his memory. Graves and Riding continued to enact a tormenting reel of emotional self-destruction until their final separation in 1939. She introduced further men into the group, stopped sleeping with Graves, and then took up, permanently, with a man called Schuyler Jackson. By the late 1930s Graves had begun a relationship, which lasted ...”

“... devised by a collective that later called itself Gran Fury, and Schulman’s book is unusual for a self-described political history in treating ACT UP’s cultural production as indivisible from its other activities. Let the Record Show, which was installed in a display window at the New Museum in SoHo, invoked memories of the Nuremberg Trials by envisioning a ...”

“... over her duties as a mother. But at the same time, there were signs of a growing confidence and self-reliance. At 15 he moved to Stamford School in Lincolnshire, but even before leaving Fettes, he had taken a stance against the culture of bullying there, letting it be known that he had no intention of behaving that way himself and encouraging others to ...”

“... in classics. If we are going to have endless retranslations of the same old texts – which is not self-evidently a good thing – we might hope that at least some of them would be done by classicists who are younger, or less white, or less male.Of course, it is quite easy for anyone, from any social background or identity, to replicate the same tired old ...”

“... unsolved. What did he have that all the others didn’t? What was his secret?Part of the answer is self-fulfilling. These books ask why people are still writing about a man who left public office more than forty years ago and has been burnishing his legend ever since, while making a lot of money on the side. Surely there must be more to his celebrity than ...”

“... stopping people from finding out God’s truth for themselves. In the late 1540s, the much more self-consciously Protestant government of Henry’s son, Edward VI, delivered the coup de grâce to the old system. It closed and confiscated the endowments of the thousands of chantries where non-monastic priests still celebrated masses for souls. In doing so it ...”

“... is essential: spying. How difficult it is for some to conceive of a club which does not seek self-advertisement and whose members don’t wish to be fawned on by clever contemporaries on the make and intent on boasting of being elected to it. The unworldly ideals of the Apostles are characteristically Cambridge. Not that such arguments will cut much ice ...”

“... Disinherited’; the insatiably romantic Emma of the story ‘Summer Night’; the dithering, self-distrusting, introspective Sydney Warren of Bowen’s very first novel, The Hotel, a prentice work memorable nearly half a century later if only because it shows in bud her later sophistication, relentless eye, stern judgment, sense of comedy and sympathetic ...”