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“... just to accept but to respect – comes back from the brink of death to be his old death-dealing self. Within the delicate predatory network of the book we are to tremble back along the lines to an earlier exchange of curbed hostilities, no less banal and no less desolately oppressive but the other way round, when Peter earlier went upstairs to his father ...”

“... serious interest in Ireland. In the meantime, however, the United Irishmen were pushed back into self-reliance, manifested in Robert Emmet’s attempted insurrection of 1803. Elliott gives this as much space as Hoche’s expedition, though it had no concrete connection with France. Like the rest of her book, apart from ...”

“... insignificant bombing of Montmartre. But it’s in Normance that Céline first hits on this self-image: ‘I’m just a chronicler, that’s all! … all I have is a little talent for chronicling … it’s nothing but a mishmash? fine! but since it’s direct experience, what counts most is the chronicler’s integrity!’ And yet it isn’t clear what ...”

“... truth’. Rose is also compellingly readable on the Stevenson biography, and its bizarre trio of self-exculpating and condemnatory appendixes by three Plath ‘friends’. There was obviously something about Plath that stung people who knew her into frantic self-justification. Rose asks: ‘What it is on Plath’s part ...”

“... nothing of real and permanent value. Cage was America’s best Dadaist, best Surrealist, best self-publicist, self-archivist, and its worst composer. He was a deeply playful and deluded man, whose project (he felt he had achieved it) was to ‘show the practicality of making works of art non-intentionally’, who ...”

“... not, in fact, own the ‘facts’ of his life, or of Plath’s: some of us might be said to be self-possessed, but none of us is in full possession of facts about ourselves beyond our reported date of birth, and – if we’re lucky – our parentage. In an essay in 1967 Hughes stated that ‘the struggle truly to possess his own experience, in other words ...”

“... writing poetry in Europe – but he evidently took pride in his facility and his craftsmanship. Robert Lowell responded with a fellow craftsman’s appreciativeness when he observed of Auden’s multifarious prose: ‘Much hard, ingenious, correct toil has gone into inconspicuous things: introductions, anthologies and translations. When one looks at them ...”

“... Michael Fried, who is also a poet, has a dense, self-questioning, fervent prose style. Somewhat perversely he has, over the last three decades – that is, since his doctoral dissertation on Manet was printed as a special issue of Artforum in 1969 – put this prose to the service of art-historical scholarship. It might have been otherwise ...”

“... painted in Rome in 1622. The daughter of a Christian Circassian chieftain, she had married Robert Shirley in Persia and is shown draped in a kind of tent of gold fabric – the effect of her clothes is splendidly exotic. Her thin-lipped, quizzical half-smile is less contrived than those of many of the court beauties. Clothes like hers offer a break ...”

“... come with three acres and a pile of manure, but the first garden city had its own version of civic self-sufficiency. Construction began in 1903 after a competition to design a town that demonstrated the ideas of Ebenezer Howard. Howard’s book Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform was loosely based on the work of Henry George and, following George’s ...”

“... reducing the action to minimal but memorable formulae, often concealing faces, as when the self-loathing of Judas is concentrated into a hunched back and a clenched fist, or when the Magi prostrate themselves like subject rulers in an Assyrian relief, or when Mary Magdalene is made to seem part of the rock on which the cross is raised. ‘Christ ...”

“... in their New York lofts, surrounded by big, painterly abstract pictures suggest lives in which self-reference has become burdensome. As time passed both Guston and Rothko started to paint darker pictures. In photographs of Monet at work on the Nymphéas in his vast studio at Giverny the nearby reality which is the source of what he is painting is ...”

“... but even more a Dudley, grandson of the ill-fated Duke of Northumberland and nephew of his sons Robert, Elizabeth’s Earl of Leicester, and Ambrose, Earl of Warwick. Ambrose was childless and, for as many years as Queen Elizabeth neither married Robert nor released him to marry anyone else, he was the presumed heir of ...”

“... disagreed about their first principles, but that moral philosophers based their arguments on self-evident truths. (An unclerical example is Sir William Temple, in his essay on Epicurus.) It was also commonly agreed that few men bowed voluntarily to the constraints of morality; nearly all had to be driven into it by supernatural warnings. Objectors, like ...”

“... indeed, and perhaps an excellent school for the inflexible later canons of neo-liberalism. Robert Lowell once said that he was glad not to have been a revolutionary when young, because it prevented him from becoming a reactionary bore in his old age. I see the point: the fact remains that in midlife and in 1968 he acted eloquently and well, as a ...”