“... of small differences, and sometimes of the surprising width of expressive power achievable within self-imposed limits. It also makes repetition, even mass production, easy – to the point where, in Damien Hirst’s dot paintings, the trademark becomes the work. So Clough, who seems constantly to have reinvented herself, who could make a picture covered in ...”

“... and some financial support to vendors. The Foundation, it says, ‘reflects the principle of self-help which governs the magazine’: think AA. John Bird says: ‘The Big Issue Foundation aims to help these people regain the dignity of independence. Self-esteem. Independence. It’s all good stuff.’ Very much the ...”

“... on Poetry in the 17th Century’. At the kitchen table of our flat in City Road she discovered the self-conscious relation between theory and practice in poem after poem of that period: with cheerful greed she devoured the entire work of people like Cowley, Davenant and Waller, literally having them for breakfast between slices of toast. This was not ...”

“... the historical intersections between British imperial history and the vicissitudes of Palestinian self-determination. No one in government wants to remember the Armistice of Mudros – which was signed by the British government and the Ottoman Empire two weeks before the general armistice in 1918 and paved the way for the establishment of the British Mandate ...”

“... status acquired in public service leveraged for private gain. With their lofty commentary and self-promotion, they seem more likely to intensify than to counter cynicism about and distrust in our institutions. It’s not that the distrust isn’t merited, but that the leisurely dad gab (‘It’s an opportunity for me to talk boringly about things like ...”

“... the greatest compliment anyone could give me’ – and it appears that in most respects Gould was self-taught.Despite his gifts, Gould wasn’t pushed as a child prodigy. His first serious concert engagement came in 1947, when, at the age of 14, he was asked to play Beethoven’s G major Concerto with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. It is typical of the way ...”

“... a drama not between generations, or between opinions, but within a wounded, deceived or conflicted self. The presence of a mother would breach the essential privacy of the emerging self, the uncertain moral consciousness on which the novel comes to depend. The conspiracy in the novel is not between a mother and her ...”

“... I’ve been collecting the stuff, fairly omnivorously, the past five or six years, but always with self-doubt and a certain ethical uneasiness. Go away a little closer, Idiot Boy. I’ve got all the recent books on the subject. But reading books – and there have been droves over the past decade – seems only to deepen the confusion. Witness Create, a glossy ...”

“... of Buddha) together define the breadth of the perceived cultural malaise and the role of self-conscious primitivism as plasma: ‘self-conscious’ because it was the product of educated, independent, ego-driven artistic choice rather than a selfless village artisan’s efforts to meet the religious/ceremonial ...”

“... illuminates both Fiona and Emily. In the novella Emily has her troubles, but is not reduced to the self-pitying, hated figure she becomes in the second half, in which her daughter remorselessly hates her. The war, hitherto excluded, is central to the second half. A brief biography of the real Alfred Tayler: ‘a vigorous and healthy man, was wounded badly in ...”

“... and then passed on as far as Carthage, carried the message of Mani (a Mesopotamian prophet and self-styled inventor of a world religion) with disturbing ease across the frontier between Rome and Persia. On top of all this, the ‘self-indulgent idiocy’ of the Christians showed what people who claimed to be good Romans ...”

“... reasons’, to create an entire book in a largely seamless approximation of Moat’s tone: self-pitying, self-justifying, sentimental, with strong undercurrents of violence – like one long Geordie country and western song. ‘The aim,’ Hankinson writes in his author’s note, ‘was to stay within Raoul Moat’s ...”

“... the list of writers who have introduced Saki’s work: Noël Coward, A.N. Wilson, Tom Sharpe, Will Self. Coward’s use of Sakian humour, though, is constrained by his urgent pursuit of the next punchline; Sharpe’s has a seaside postcard quality that has dated more in forty years than Saki’s has in a hundred. Saki is often said to ring through the novels ...”

“... the then minister for agriculture, Peter Walker, was able to claim that the UK was now 75 per cent self-sufficient in temperate foodstuffs and, more remarkable still, according to the boast of the Conservative Campaign Guide that year, 100 per cent self-sufficient in wheat.Free trade zealots retorted that this was nothing to ...”

“... was trying, as Scholar says, ‘to show his readers that the language they spoke was not a self-evident set of meanings … but a process of making and remaking meaning in which they could choose to play a fully conscious and active part’. This is Scholar’s goal too, but the words he concentrates on have a quite special life, and this is where his ...”