“... silver in the age of Web 2.0, Thomson has since added, is open to doubt. But that doesn’t stop Robert Gottlieb from presenting himself, at the start of his new biography, as an unapologetic negative theologian. ‘She’s still hiding – no one will ever know what was taking place behind those amazing eyes. Only the camera knew.’The story of Garbo’s ...”

“... this poem as remarkably unkind and accusatory. How does the poet know so much about Margaret’s self-concern? Is he right about her? Do we all have to feel the way Margaret is said to? But recently I have come to hear the stress differently. It is not that Margaret is mourning only for herself; just that she is mourning for herself, whatever else she may be ...”

“... billboards and (by 1948) 137 million postage stamps. Since then it has proved useful not only to self-styled patriots but also to satirists, most recently in the New Yorker, whose issue of 28 May featured on its cover Barry Blitt’s redrawing of the Iwo Jima event with the flag at half-mast and one visibly black soldier contributing to the ...”

“... while levying heavy tariffs to protect landowners’ profits. Liberals, and liberal Tories like Robert Peel, realised that slimming the state allowed them to defend it better against this radical critique. After the 2008 financial crisis, the Conservative political strategy of ‘austerity’ meant that Labour could be identified as irresponsible high ...”

“... novels, among them a belief in the primacy of the conduct of the individual and the quest for self-knowledge over any group allegiance, a belief in elitism and a suspicion of democracy and equality. In The Mask of Apollo (1966), Axiothea, a girl who disguises herself as a boy to attend Plato’s academy, says: ‘Equality! I hope I need never sink so ...”

“... writer, born around 1890, raged against ‘mass-production robot factories and the roar of self-obstructive mechanical traffic’ and ‘the rawness and ugliness of modern European life’. Instead he loved the trees and hedgerows of the English Midlands he had known as a boy, and the tales of ‘little, ultimate creatures’ he came across in the ...”

“... provenance, his argument being that these had a range of application beyond their current, self-consciously technical uses The point was well made in chapters on Medieval and Renaissance literature. Structuralism might seem offensively newfangled to readers trained up on post-Renaissance notions of authorial presence and the unique, individual ...”

“... observes, not quite believing that he is putting right a wrong. The best of Defoe’s poetry was self-consciously rumbustious, and Jure Divino has some snappy couplets. Here are its opening lines: Nature has left this Tincture in the Blood, That all Men would be Tyrants if they cou’d: If they forbear their Neighbours to devour, ’Tis not for want of ...”

“... death comes in the last paragraphs of Brave New World. After an orgy of sexual riot followed by self-flagellating disgust, John the Savage, who is too good for the new world, strings himself up in the Surrey countryside: ‘Slowly, very slowly, like two unhurried compass needles, the feet turned towards the right; north, north-east, east.’Why did ...”

“... things, but contain them.’ And indeed, like her chosen idol, Cather made a fetish out of proud self-concealment. She never married, and despite the tremendous popular success of her work – she won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours and had her picture on the cover of Time magazine in 1931 – she became reclusive and incommunicative in later years. She ...”

“... The Peter Wright trial in Australia has recently brought out the full absurdity of this, with Sir Robert Armstrong attempting at one point to suggest that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 (let alone the identity of their directors) was a secret which could neither be confirmed nor denied. There is no other state in the world which behaves like this and ...”

“... to re-impose the formal structures left behind them in their travels through space and time. Robert Lawson-Peebles’s word for this dialectic is ‘redcoatism’, after the practice of British regiments in the French and Indian War of lining up in bright scarlet uniforms only to get picked off by their assailants hiding behind trees. But the American ...”

“... than others, however much we may protest that they are merely different? For instance, does Robert Lowell’s Life Studies intrigue us more than, say, Tony Harrison’s family reminiscences in Continuous? If so, is it because Lowell’s technique is more sophisticated and fluid than Harrison’s vigorously clanking sonnet sequence in which the rhymes ...”

“... and those unwilling to look fools, widens. Lawrence Weschler’s life of the Californian artist Robert Irwin is the best description I know of why spending months deciding how to put two orange lines on an orange square, or why offering a strip of black tape round the skirting of a gallery as your contribution to an exhibition, could be ...”

“... seriousness of one who has thought long and fairly deeply. The writing could not be said to show self-knowledge or wisdom, perhaps, and Eisenstein admits this, admits, even, its ‘completely shameless narcissism’: but, alertly translated by Eisenstein’s former student Herbert Marshall, it is a convincing demonstration of Baudelaire’s idea that ‘the ...”