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“... it seems likely that Orwell needed some symbolic manumission in order to emancipate his writing self. One notes, in support of this, the prominence in the novels of heroes like Gordon Comstock who break with their stultifying families. And it is interesting, in the light of the works reviewed here, that Patricia Highsmith also seems to have been one of ...”

“... She concentrates on 17th-century Holland, where one particular stance – indicating, she thinks, self-possession – almost achieved the ‘status of a national attribute’. A surprisingly large proportion of militia company portraits include one or more figures with an arm pugnaciously akimbo: usually not the commanding officer, who might consider himself ...”

“... 19th-century American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell). Everything-knowers are admired, though with qualifications: the ...”

“... to reinvent himself with every press interview) and those of his friend, the conductor and writer Robert Craft, who has passed off much of his own prose as the composer’s, and whose custodianship of the Stravinsky legacy Walsh regards as dubious. Then there is the mystifying role of Russia, where the Stravinsky archives were so long inaccessible, and whose ...”

“... know that beneath all exteriors lie subterranean streams and caverns where the private, unknowable self contradicts the stated desires and achievements of the visible life. A biography, these days, must be a tale of the unexpected. Wouldn’t modern readers feel cheated to find that Antonia White and A.A. Milne were wise and devoted parents, or that Larkin ...”

“... I nibble leafage’. Some readers sympathise with the narrator while others find her appallingly self-absorbed and demanding, but no one has criticised Rush for his ventriloquism. I suspect this is not because he managed it so well, but because by situating most of the novel in Africa, where he lived and worked for six years, he was shielded by the authority ...”

“... speak made me shudder. It is not womanly to thrust yourself before the world.’ Extraordinary ‘self-assurance’ was the quality picked out by Gladstone, when, as prime minister, he took time off to review Besant’s autobiography in 1893. He attributed it to the lack of a sense of sin, which enabled her to change direction without a qualm. For ...”

“... Slugging it out with Diana Trilling in the pages of Commentary, Robert Lowell remarked: ‘Controversy is bad for the mind and worse for the heart.’ Mrs Trilling, for all the world like Dorothea Brooke or some other 19th-century heroine of the strenuously examined life, replied: ‘I have never thought controversy bad for either the mind or the heart ...”

“... many people left accounts of what she said and did; but it also meant, as her previous biographer, Robert Halsband, has demonstrated, that dubious anecdotes had a habit of attaching themselves to her. Though Grundy attempts to solve the problem of naming by reserving ‘Montagu’ for the literary career and ‘Lady Mary’ for the rest, the variousness of her ...”

“... more important, perhaps, than it seems to us today. He was shamelessly egotistic and his self-importance attracted readers to the theatrical excitements he publicised. In his autobiographical Ego books he was less candid than Hazlitt was, but then he risked imprisonment. James Harding reveals Agate as a reckless hunter after unlawful pleasures. It is ...”

“... tenderness and outrageous inventions. Hagiographical prefaces to his books by Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley align him with Hart Crane and Keats as a poet vulnerable to the world and prone to self-destruction. Wieners himself remembered taking the ferry to Provincetown with Frank O’Hara: ‘We stood again below deck ...”

“... number of other members of the Movement for Democratic Change were arrested, tortured and beaten. Robert Mugabe had banned all MDC meetings and rallies in the hope of suppressing the MDC completely before this year’s elections. The local churches entered the fray and organised a prayer meeting in Highfield, a suburb of Harare. Tsvangirai drove to the ...”

“... included in Stranger Shores (2001), opens: ‘Born in the autumn years of the Habsburg Empire, Robert Musil served His Imperial and Royal Majesty in one bloody continental convulsion and died halfway through the even worse convulsion that followed.’ A Musil piece in Inner Workings, which takes up some material from the earlier essay ...”

“... Frenchmen, men of ‘absolute normality’. The typical Houellebecq hero is a bored, alienated, self-pitying man who is losing his place in society, at work and, worst of all, in the bedroom. In a ruthless, zero-sum sexual marketplace, he loses out to men who are more powerful or more virile. Houellebecq is notorious for his pornographic depictions of sex ...”

“... by periods of falling out and kissing and making up with England, episodes in which national self-interest was always prominent, whether in James’s opportunistic support for Perkin Warbeck against Henry VII in the 1490s or his acquisition of Margaret as Queen in the 1500s. In the run-up to Flodden, James lodged his claim to the English throne should ...”