“... demi-monde’s chief bagman, Milne is able to state with complete forensic confidence thatIt is self-evident that the Libyan money, still in dollars in Lloyds Bank on 3 December and deposited into a sterling account on 4 December, cannot have been the money Windsor produced from his safe on 29 October, some five weeks earlier. It cannot have been the money ...”

“... to expose some of the imperatives which have driven policy in this important field of democratic self-government. He shows how, before the Second World War, it was the Conservatives who first championed the idea of a Greater London Council. They did so for the obvious reason that it would mobilise the suburban electorate in such a way as to wrest power away ...”

“... author, Balzac appears as a monstre sacré, hypnotic and appalling by turns in his unpuncturable self-regard. He was a monster of excess, capable when he was behind on a deadline of writing day in day out for 18 hours out of the 24, and of sleeping for just as long in his intervals of exhaustion. If his complaining correspondence were to be believed, you ...”

“... you don’t. Theirs is the grief or gladness your death brings. And there is the truth, abundantly self-evident, that seems, now that I think of it, the one most elusive to my old in-laws, to the parish priest, and to perfect strangers who are forever accosting me in barber-shops and in cocktail bars and at parent-teacher conferences, hell-bent or duty-bound ...”

“... references as providing for Dostoevsky’s journalism a ‘penumbra’ that served as a sort of self-protection; one had to be very careful when arguing with a man who could adduce his own legendary exile and prison sentence for radicalism to buttress his arguments against it. Morson’s remark refers to the 1860s, but it is equally applicable to ...”

“... Pyrex bowlswith ten leftovers down in the bottoms.This gesture is not just tender but dainty – self-conscious, flirtatious. There is nothing unpractised about it; it isn’t plausible as a one-off. There may not have been other explicit urgings to live, but those are for special occasions, surely. There must have been a daily exercise of affection for the ...”

“... principally non-conformism. No child with a woman one doesn’t love. With a woman I love, her self-abandon seems to me infinitely more moving in this form.Paul Eluard: Why?André Breton: From a materialist angle, in the case of the woman I love, it is infinitely more pessimistic (law of shit) and consequently more poetic.Paul Eluard: Why, for ...”

“... schoolchildren and students entering adult literacy. But a good proportion must also be reaching self-improving readers. One of the weaknesses of the Orwellian model is its assumption that readers remain true to their class patterns all their lives. Many readers who like to think of themselves as cultivated will, I suspect, have followed the same sort of ...”

“... finds nothing to be admired, considers discontent a mark of worldy wisdom, is too cynical for self-respect and too dull-witted and purblind to be truly cynical. He could be pertinacious and merciless in revenge, brave at bay, perhaps generous on impulse. A Cornishman, a gentleman, and miserable. Figures seen with this super-real vividness inhabit the ...”

“... World. Alongside the rapacious ambition to discover lost cities of gold, there ran a perpetual, self-defeating desire for encounters with a special sort of other, impossibly defined and therefore never met. These strangers had to be sufficiently like Europeans (in terms of monarchy, street-plans, polite society) to command respect; tough enough to withstand ...”

“... Throughout, the letters bear down on ‘Dear Allen’ with touching affection and bludgeoning self-regard. It’s as well, therefore, to read them as a tribute to their recipient, especially since the nature of the collection means that Ginsberg fails, unusually, to get a word in edgeways. Ginsberg was noisier and altogether more generous than ...”

“... leadership to the protest movement of the mid-Eighties. Now, the PC is a shadow of its former self; the PS has moved to the centre-left, ruling with its pre-1973 adversaries, the Christian Democrats; and the MIR is long dead. The Christian Democrats, having backed the coup for about a year, waited until the economic collapse of the early Eighties allowed ...”

“... began to be more keenly smelled’; thresholds of tolerance were lowered, and it became self-evident that something needed to be done about improving the situation. Corbin attributes this change in perception, in part at any rate, to the influence of scientific theory, but without suggesting that scientific theory was correct. Most of it was ...”

“... and Anaïs Nin, who did each other good but – fortunately, no doubt, for them – were much too self-absorbed to ascribe dominance to someone else. One cannot imagine either saying: ‘The one who dictates inside is you.’ More temperately, Nin wrote to Miller that ‘you gave me reality and I gave you introspection, but we have to keep ourselves balanced ...”

“... has cropped up so frequently in American mythology he has become an icon of the country’s self-divisions and betrayals. Jones doesn’t present Baggit sentimentally or symbolically; if his death is significant, it’s mainly because it happens to coincide with the news of Jim Morrison’s, on 9 July 1971. It is while brooding on his great idol’s ...”