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“... render belated homage, and I will never forgive myself for this failure.’ The tone is not just self-abasing (‘I quail before de Gaulle. He is the Great Other, the inaccessible absolute’ etc), but self-flagellating. What Debray can’t get over is that for most of his life ‘De Gaulle just made us snigger’: he was ...”

“... based on class. This is reflected in every aspect of their branding, packaging, advertising and self-image: Marks & Spencer’s is very middle-class, Sainsbury’s is middle-class, Tesco is careful to track the aspirations of the British mass market, and Asda is more like its former, cheap-but-cheerful self than it is ...”

“... in which he’d been trained as the long-lost twin of New Criticism: both treated texts as self-contained structures, accepted only internal evidence, and ignored cultural context. The division of labour between textual editors and literary critics made no sense to him, because ‘the material forms of books, the non-verbal elements of the typographic ...”

“... no pudeur about expressing his resentments or his enthusiasms. To a casual teenaged visitor his self-centredness was somehow much more sympathetic than it sounds when recorded in cold print. But it was wearing to live with, not least for himself.Why was Sassoon like this? In the public mind he remained not only one of the most celebrated poets of the Great ...”

“... internment in Liverpool, she arrived in London in December 1942. When she died of tuberculosis and self-starvation in a sanatorium in Ashford, Kent, on 24 August 1943, she had been separated from her parents for nine months. In London she wrote day and night, far exceeding the pedestrian reports the Free French asked her to produce. Her output in this period ...”

“... in the early 1960s, she nonetheless continued picking up nubile girls with aplomb, including (says Robert Schanke) a ‘tubercular young British actress who was a waitress in a coffee shop’. Once one might have welcomed such a seduction, fang marks, TB and all. I remember much relishing de Acosta’s gossipy 1960 autobiography, Here Lies the Heart, when it ...”

“... Can historical biography still be written? Joel Hurstfield, who had planned a life of Robert Cecil, the chief minister inherited by James I from Queen Elizabeth, abandoned it in the 1960s in the belief that the genre had had its day. Geoffrey Elton, so much of whose career has been occupied with the achievements of Thomas Cromwell, has never thought biography to be the fitting means of approaching him ...”

“... to Part One of the book. He sees Tennyson’s career divided into a phase of post-Romantic self-making, followed by a phase of cultural engagement. In Part Two, as Tucker promises, historical context is allowed back, and the book becomes both more interesting and more persuasive: but it never fully recovers from this distinction. The idea that ...”

“... claim on its inside cover. It’s not the fraudulence of this that strikes the eye so much as the self-pity. The bosses of the new conservatism go about the place talking (but by no means looking) like the members of some dissident and persecuted underground. All you have to do, in order to sympathise with these neo-zealots, is pretend to yourself that the ...”

“... from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity. Which seems to me self-evidently true: but the writer who is out-of-country, even out-of-language may experience this loss in an intensified form. It is made more concrete for him by the physical fact of discontinuity, of his present being in a different place from his past, of ...”

“... in Hollywood, but none of his scripts was ever produced. He worked as a speech-writer for Robert Kennedy, a career cut short by JFK’s assassination. Recently, there has been a considerable resurgence of interest in his writing, previously limited to a small but dedicated following among writers such as Richard Ford, Stewart O’Nan and Michael ...”

“... cannot account for by the ordinary Methods of Knowledge, and Principles of Reason. Enthusiasm was self-deception hardened into certainty, ‘Men being most forwardly obedient to the impulses they receive from themselves’. It was ridiculous (hence Locke’s dry tone), but powerful. Locke passed his intellectual curiosity about the powers of enthusiasm to his ...”

“... that this fear was disguised, even from those who felt it, by publically-accredited rhetorics of self-reliance. Like the new historicists he admires, Leverenz has decided that self-fashioning is animated by forces outside the individual, that these are only superficially situated in specific historical events (Like the ...”

“... a rosy reflection of all whom we care for enough, the Other rendered perfect in a paradise of our self-love. If MacSweeney’s poem takes its measure from The Infant and the Pearl, it’s nonetheless a more desperate work, cutting away to contemporary horrors with intent to shock. In ‘Cavalry at Calvary’, written to the Guardian journalist Maggie ...”

“... unself-conscious or natural. Even when male literary theorists (such as Wayne Booth, Robert Scholes and Terry Eagleton) have taken an interest in feminist criticism, they have seen problems of sexual difference as women’s problems, addressing – to use Jonathan Culler’s terms – the issue of ‘reading as a woman’ but assuming that ...”