“... survivors and brutality in the destroyers’; the one from Malcolm about the necessary violence of self-defence: ‘I don’t even call it violence when it’s self-defence, I call it intelligence.’ But the quotations are not there for what they say. They are there for the meaning of the two names, their evocation of what ...”

“... about the Labour Party suddenly has a fresh and convincing answer: John Smith, the elected leader, self-evidently calls the shots. No doubt he would have preferred, in time-honoured style, to stitch up the block votes in advance behind his rule changes, had he been able to do so. Instead, he found the consolation of demonstrating his mettle in the initially ...”

“... to scorn the efforts of anyone who just dabbles, particularly if the dabbling looks like academic self-promotion. Significantly, those who have made a real difference to Ruskin studies over the past 20 years have not come from within the British university system. The courageous work of Helen Gill Viljoen, first of those who dared to challenge the magisterial ...”

“... lost skills and teaching all kinds of restoration. After initial problems, this became a self-supporting success. When James died in 1984, Monkton and its surrounding acres reverted to the trust and were sold off to provide further capital – despite some opposition from those who wished to preserve it as a Surrealist monument. Its owner was buried ...”

“... counselling take place on television. We all encounter electronically these days. Celebrities are self-protective. Unless they are George Best, they know not to give too much away. ‘Ordinary folk’ are innocents in the business of self-exposure, which is why they’re much in demand. They flutter to the studio lights ...”

“... of “Man” with that of the “subject”, which is gendered, “decentred”, and no longer self-determining.’ Yet it seems we go on believing in the feasibility of a decent life, although its rationale must be hard to formulate, let alone justify: certainly nothing worthy (thank God, some will say) of being called an ideology. We believe (which may ...”

“... phrase like that would be a family treasure. But Osborne’s humour is aggressive, not black, not self-deprecating, not tolerant; it makes the world a harder place. The letters make the memoirs easier for the reader, however: one looks forward to them. In the days of heady fame – of Broadway and the Royal Court, of pursuit by the press, of ...”

“... however, until the First World War turned a broadly benevolent indifference into interest and self-interest, then into irritation, and finally into apprehension that The American Cancer (a title of 1931) threatened the French way of life. The war had bled France white, economic crisis had destabilised it further. The French began to question ...”

“... obsessed with violence and with his own homosexuality, but also a sophisticated, ironic and self-consciously art-historical artist. Can we accept this? According to Van Mander’s account, ‘after a fortnight’s work’ Caravaggio would ‘sally forth for a couple of months at a time with his rapier at his side and his page behind him going from one ...”

“... is specialised (and not my specialism), but by this she means that the gentleman is not ‘self-divided’ – not, that is, torn between reason and emotion, the ideal and the actual. For the Trollopian gentleman-hero, there is no oscillation between the here and now and the remote and what should be: the world is of a piece. The benightedly ...”

“... of Beaconsfield, and confidant of the Queen. In poem after poem Byron had revealed the histrionic self-doubt and sense of evil which had goaded him from one extravagant action to another; he had then moved on to the wonderfully truth-revealing irresponsibility and mischief of Don Juan. The result? A European-wide reputation, and one great poem, certainly: but ...”

“... vulgarian, punning and burping his way through high society. But Hildesheimer’s way with this self-imposed assignment has none of these depressing features. He admires Mozart above all other humans: in fact, he concludes his book calling him ‘an unearned gift to humanity, nature’s unique, unmatched, and probably unmatchable work of art’. He wants to ...”

“... that makes these poems so very demanding and difficult. While the language is charged with the self-awareness that distinguishes poetic language, these poems are not primarily self-reflective. When poetry is in some sense the subject, the process is more one of self-interrogation. The ...”

“... the final two, the language of psychotherapy starts to play a crucial role. Though the jargon of self-help is mocked throughout, At Last is explicitly about ‘closure’. It turns on the realisation that Eleanor had not just been ‘the co-victim of David’s tempestuous malice’. The deeper truth, which Patrick can only now bear to contemplate, is that ...”

“... the sly.’) But of course he’s also gesturing towards his own role as a projection of the Hemon self, a self that’s been doubled, reimagined and refracted in four books of fiction so far without straying too wildly from the same biographical outline. Hemon – ‘pronounced as Haemon’, one of his avatars says – was ...”