“... might well have regarded with disdain. Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, the self-consciously classical narrative poems he published in 1593 and 1594, with their dutifully obsequious dedications to Southampton, were what mattered to him, rather than Titus Andronicus, The Taming of the Shrew and the early history plays, which he made no ...”

“... Colonial Office knew that a stable ‘Malayan’ nation could not be created and brought towards self-government while the enormous Chinese immigrant population was excluded from citizenship – treated as if it did not exist. And yet they themselves shared much of the anti-Chinese prejudice. The British entered South-East Asia in the wake of the Portuguese ...”

“... and replied: ‘Go on with you! Scat!’ This image of a person obscurely in the know, at once self-collected and reticent, is also an image of the person Bishop became – or the one many took her to be. But Bishop knew that you could compel attention by declining to demand it, and that restraint could be a kind of plea. She once wrote of a friend: ‘She ...”

“... seemed to get its freedom and intensity back: richnesses that had been suppressed – either by self-censorship or academic dictate – since the days of Delacroix. No one did colour more blatantly and more unexpectedly than Van Gogh. Its blatancy gives his pictures their roaring charm. Colour, he seems to be saying: you haven’t seen colour before, look ...”

“... can seem mythical. Like proper myths, its stories are almost exclusively about metamorphosis, self-destruction and things going wrong, but they are at least stories as opposed to advertisements. Jean Stein’s book deploys a wonderful grace in uncovering a monstrous reality – it tells brilliant stories, sometimes very personal ones, and lets their ...”

“... to me, ugly in their strangeness.’ Though Javo’s strangeness marks a banishment of the self to some deep and unknowable realm of experience, Nora traces that absence on the surfaces of his face: on his extravagantly burned, scarred skin; into his violently blue eyes, their pupils wide and whited out by dope; across the ridges of his skull and his ...”

“... the individual, honour was understood as a quality with interior and exterior aspects, a form of self-esteem requiring constant confirmation from the community. The honourable man sought to be generous, honest, elegant, courteous and courageous, and to be known for possessing these qualities. If a man could not think of himself as honourable, he could not ...”

“... and the possibility of happiness, the pursuit of which would come to dominate visions of American self-fulfilment.If indentured service was a type of slavery, as has often been maintained, it followed the classical model according to which, through manumission, unfree Romans might level up to full citizenship. In any case, unlike black slaves, white ...”

“... was killed in Romania by the advancing Red Army), he worked his way out of hardship and became a self-described ‘consistent Marxist’ in his early political career. He was elected to the Bundestag in 1980 and is said to have stood outside the Chancellery in Bonn one night after a lengthy visit to a local pub, shaking the fence and shouting: ‘I want to ...”

“... show at California State College, Fullerton, and placed an ad in Artforum magazine. Other forms of self-fashioning were also afoot. For the exhibition poster Chicago posed as a prize fighter in a boxing ring. She appears, crop-haired and stocky, in shorts, ankle boots and gloves, leaning against the ropes. The words ‘JUDY CHICAGO’ are printed across the ...”

“... not need to know this but I need to tell you – is merely the converse of the darkly enigmatic self-tormentor, with his one virtue and a thousand crimes. Good writers soon grasped that the best way to deal with this hero is to place him in the most equivocal dimension possible, by means of different narrators, or variously subtle forms of ...”

“... violently emotive to Saint-Just himself, and that he carried this meaning, with all his stunning self-assurance and self-righteousness, intact into the storm centre of Revolutionary politics. In ‘De la Nature’ Saint-Just took the theoretical framework of European natural law and contorted it to express his own hectic ...”

“... of demonstrative argument. This mathematical model requires an argument to begin from certain self-evident principles and assumptions and to proceed by deductive arguments which transmit the certainty of the premises to the conclusions; Socratic cross-examination evidently cannot meet these standards. If Vlastos is right, Plato’s mathematical model for ...”

“... an aesthete fostered some paragraphs which are subjected to a withering critique in his remarkable self-portrait Pack My Bag, written in 1938-9 under the threat of war and now reissued. He began his first novel Blindness while still at school; it came out while he was at Oxford. His account of undergraduate life there in Pack My Bag is a little rushed, but it ...”

“... to know where we are by never being anywhere else. And one fundamental means of orientation, of self-recognition, is the difference between the sexes, despite the fact that in practice they keep leaking into each other. Once you stop pointing to body parts and start talking, the apparent differences between men and women begin to dissipate. So if we ...”