“... he wants to change his own life.’But undoing false narratives, in the hope that a more authentic self might somehow be located, requires a repositioning on two fronts: in the way a person chooses to interact with and represent the world, and in the way they make sense of their past. At home in Cambridge, Tunde decides to shower with a bar of black soap. He ...”

“... not actually married to K, has baby Nicolette, K going off to Balkans, now J falling in love with Robert Kee, who spends weekend at Ham Spray, F. Partridge approves,’ and so on. Sometimes it all seemed very distant and unimportant. And as for Frances Partridge’s approval, I think I would have gone a long way to avoid spending a weekend at Ham Spray (that ...”

“... to the Enlightenment, and to do with new emphases placed on individual experience and ‘the Self’. To do with walking in high places, with sudden, untranslatable visions, with the Infinite. The problems of the Enlightenment may be unanswerable, beyond certain remarks about secularism and the march of Reason, but the siting of Romanticism is no less ...”

“... stub of a piton hammered in by the first person to tread this way thirty years before), and with self-images. On a climb that frightens me my self feels to myself like an overheated cave; doubts of my adequacy flicker and dart like a maddened bat; not until this uncontrollable soot-black monster deigns to retreat into the ...”

“... he will never be entirely dead. In family histories such simple pleasures can easily turn to self-congratulation – the kind, for instance, that led to the male Stracheys’ smug sense that ‘the Stracheys are most strongly the children of their fathers, not their mothers … it does not matter whom they marry, the type continues and has been much the ...”

“... between us was important to us, but it is not important to the pictures. What is in them is self-contained and, in some strange way, free of us both. That day, however, when I asked him about the final images, he related an elegant and nicely self-contained anecdote. He had been away, he said, working in Switzerland ...”

“... a particularly serious publisher of poetry. Appearing there did nothing to contradict Bishop’s self-stylisation as a ‘poet by default’: ‘I’ve always felt that I’ve written poetry more by not writing it than writing it.’ In a generation at worst of noise-makers and grimly professional professionals – ‘Les Maudits: the compliment/ each ...”

“... with the beautiful faces were also, mysteriously, the ones it was most fun to be with.’ The self-proclaimed ‘honesty’ of the wild, well-born stranger was doubted, but her fascination prevailed. She married an art dealer, Kenelm, understood to be seriously ill, and conducted daring affairs, one of them on the Métro with her friend Monique’s friend ...”

“... work under the new industrialism, and is balanced by the critical yet sympathetic discussion of ‘Self-Help and Respectability’ which follows. He respects the experience of working men who became Methodists: ‘the message that comes through innumerable accounts of the great central Methodist experience of conversion is one of joy and hope.’ To some ...”

“... uneasiness about motive: is the denouncer the patriot that he claims to be, or is he acting out of self-interest and a wish to settle personal scores? The rhetoric of civic virtue with which governments (and schools, prisons and other closed institutions) surround denunciation coexists with a subaltern counter-discourse in which denunciation is an act of ...”

“... Bagehot undoubtedly was, thoroughly, professionally and ancestrally: a banker. His grandfather Robert Bagehot was a West Country merchant who shipped goods up the River Parrett under the name of the Somerset Trading Company. Robert’s younger son, Thomas, married the niece of Samuel Stuckey, the founder of Stuckey’s ...”

“... a groundswell but more than a splinter-group.) There have been violent exceptions to the rule of self-restraint. On 18 February a wild man who hated taxes flew a single-engine plane into a federal building in Austin, Texas; a group of Tea Partiers mobbed the Democrats on the Capitol steps after the healthcare vote and shouted epithets at the lawmakers; and ...”

“... for the first time under pressure.’ Since the war, the US had privileged the economic self-interest of its recovering allies, accepting their protectionism and an overvalued dollar as the price to be paid for its political hegemony. But the Vietnam War had depleted the Treasury, escalated inflation and upset the balance of payments, which only ...”

“... sorts of American writers: the young Allen Ginsberg paid him homage and copied his style, while Robert Lowell, for example, looked to Williams for a freer, more democratic manner than his rivals could offer. Though he remains an acquired taste in Britain, Williams’s position in American poetry, at least, seems assured. That position rests, above all ...”

“... Picasso had, after 1950, become Adolf Wölfli, or John Ford had ended up as John Cassavetes. Or if Robert Crumb had turned into his obsessive mad-genius brother, Charles Crumb. If thisweredrawn byKirby inthe 1970sit wouldbe a massivegleaminghystericallyhyperarticulatedpsychedelicedifice ...”