“... skin a kid rips from a smelly, smashed elder-branch? Now that the academies are switching into self-destruct and gibberwick I’ve fallen in love again with a rich old library and those darkblue bindings; I’m bending the knee now to letter and copy-text, the fine print of the ...”

“... an irritable “What? What?” in reply.’ Lodge has set himself a difficult task with this self-portrait of an ordinary man who’s past his prime. In his earlier novels, he personified types or ideas and let the different subjectivities fight it out, with a bit of cheerful tweaking from him. Here, by contrast, he confines himself to one, unrelativised ...”

“... What Plath is really doing, she explains, is writing a poem in which phrases that look like self-descriptions (‘I/smile, cross-legged,/Enigmatical’) generate patterns of sound and form that ‘feed into’ new images. Plath notices she is constructing her poem in this way and inserts phrases like ‘shifting my clarities’ that let the reader know ...”

“... of a wounded animal, twice-divorced and in permanent need of distraction. Manipulative and wildly self-absorbed, she is capable of inflicting Livia Soprano levels of damage on her offspring. Helen hasn’t exactly got the life she wanted but, as her daughter Bridget tells us, she clings to the sustaining delusion that things might change:As with her hating ...”

“... to say and said it.’ How you value that process depends on how you value that form of deliberate self-expression – so popular in the 20th century – which contains a large element of the mere expression of opinion. Speaking of Aldington, among others, Wyndham Lewis fairly says: ‘it is not quite certain that we were not just as big fools as our not very ...”

“... 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 ...”