“... paper that came to hand.’Long afterwards, the prime minister Édouard Herriot praised her as a self-taught wonder: ‘No education at the École, no teacher. Pure instinct.’ Only the first statement is true. Valadon took lessons by watching Puvis, Lautrec, Renoir and others at work, noting their materials, techniques and process, their props and sources ...”

“... contributed to their rapid impoverishment. Political activity began with the evolution of economic self-help schemes organised on a communal basis and was hastened by the Jews’ need to defend themselves against the anti-semitic violence accompanying Tsarist repression of liberalism (which culminated in the pogroms of the early 1880s and those following the ...”

“... remarks Aviq, putting boiled seal meat on the table. It has been painful to see Kunak. The self-confident hunter, Vietnam vet and union electrician often years back stays home now, at his mother’s expense, nagged by mythological dreams. Kunak has three linked fixations. These are that the new town overlies the site of the ancient, pre-Eskimo shaman ...”

“... of liberalism itself, but he sees this as little more than a tradition of endless disagreement, a self-congratulatory inconclusiveness. You would scarcely gather that there are liberal traditions that have tried to make ethical sense of modern society in terms of rights and other notions that go a long way beyond consumerism. MacIntyre’s central criticism ...”

“... or subconsciously copied, from his father. There is certainly a streak of valetudinarianism in the self-portrait that emerges almost reluctantly from these generally buttoned-up but sometimes, by contrast, disquietingly confidential pages. It is hard to believe that this is the younger brother of Klaus and Erika Mann, the most way-out of Germany’s ...”

“... Copper once put it, ‘the Beast stands for strong mutually antagonistic governments everywhere. Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.’ Considerations of this kind tend to be forgotten once war begins, but one day the swift evolution from Desert Shield through Imminent Thunder to Desert Storm will make a great ...”

“... preternaturally young, were waved in unison in front of platforms where his current 70-year old self, the black hair turned white and the face turned wrinkled, was appearing in person. The news was his news: if Ceausescu visited a chicken farm, it took precedence over everything else. On the day of the Armenian earthquake Romanian Television led on a ...”

“... not hopelessly lost) educative, retrievable, and involves the necessary destruction of a false self – in this case, the self that is not yet close to God, not yet shepherded in. Breakdown is purposive, has a language that is coherent (for those with the ears to hear), and is nothing less than a sign of the operation of ...”

“... to chat up his glamorous French co-hostess, who consistently squelched him as a total creep. This self-caricature is no more Clive James (who by his own account is clearly as attractive to foreign ladies as the next celebrity) than Edna Everage and her remarks about tinted gentlemen is the sophisticated Mr Humphries. One of James’s most effective tricks is ...”

“... of a Galsworthy or a Wells, though these novelists would have allowed their narrators a greater self-awareness than ever comes Hugh Gordon’s way. He has spent his time since leaving Oxford working in London for the Third World causes championed by his incongruously left-wing wife, and after the double failure of his marriage and his return to Starne he ...”

“... major preoccupations, and his lust for men was as distressing to him as his desire for women was self-affirming and ecstatic,’ Susan Cheever wrote in Home before Dark, published three years after Cheever’s death in 1982. It was the first public admission that ‘the Ovid of Ossining’, the man who once said his epitaph should read ‘Here lies John ...”

“... gaze, never to be seen again. Specifically, the party introduces three ‘highly-selected’ and self-made women – all contemporaries at Cambridge in the early Fifties and now middle-aged. One, Alix Bowen, wants to ‘change things’. An evangelical Leavisite, she teaches English to prisoners. Alix buries herself in Northam ‘that figurative Northern ...”

“... and the law of rape; standards of reasonableness, particularly in cases where provocation and self-defence are at issue; the position of black and Asian women and the interaction between sexism and racism; domestic violence and battered women’s syndrome, and so on. She ranges from the major questions (in what sense is crime or criminal law ...”

“... Literature, where many readers have wished to keep him suspended. Clothes exist to remind the self of the body, and to create a worldly body for each person. Anderson connects them with Kafka’s interest in bodily states and qualities, both his own and those of his characters, as well as with his literary technique, with the skilful cut of his fictional ...”

“... too much latitude in the direction of high-sounding prose. In its poetic vein his writing tends to self-parody, to be portentous, and to create an air of solemnity which tempts irreverence. Ondaatje spent eight years writing The English Patient, a fact which his publisher reports as though it somehow guaranteed the novel’s quality, making Ondaatje into a ...”