“... If one turns to what China Diary actually is, one has to say that it is a mildly narcissistic, self-indulgent ramble, quite pleasant to read, and with occasional flashes of insight. Thus Spender remarks that ‘there are times in China when the tourists seem totally disconnected from the places they are visiting... like the plug of the television set in ...”

“... to the King. He was well-rewarded as a portraitist. Personally he was unprepossessing. This Self-Portrait (1813) sent to his brother in India shows a contained, serious concentration which fits with accounts of an outwardly shy man, who liked better to stand by than to join in. He suffered from periods of depression – one, when he was in his ...”

“... the two paintings by Gentileschi – A Sibyl is the other one – and his daughter Artemisia’s self-portrait. Without these the exhibition would be significant; with them it is magnificent. As well as paintings there are rooms of drawings. A few, like Michelangelo’s Fall of Phaeton and A Children’s Bacchanal, were presentation pieces, and thus ends in ...”

“... is a theatrical approximation of The Hayes Court Sitting Room, an exploded view of the dandy’s self-enclosing urge to make a world against the world.As with des Esseintes, the point is to retreat into the interior, the better to find yourself elsewhere. The Hayes Court Sitting Room is partly the sitting room of Chaimowicz’s childhood in Paris. In some ...”

“... Dance. They play, perfectly, the classic Oedipal parts of brilliant bullied child and impatient, self-admiring father. And they lead us into those zones of the monster myth del Toro is most interested in: the tendencies of geniuses to be unhappy with success, of caretakers not to take care and the magical games truth can play with fact. There is an ...”

“... his mission, he could neither move to Greenland nor learn the language. Denmark had no truck with self-employed preachers settling in its territory, and there were no Greenlandic teaching materials in English. Shull moved to Reykjavik, and while he fought for the right to set up his church in Greenland, he began translating Danish-language Greenlandic ...”

“... am large, I contain multitudes.’ Contemporaries of the poet picked up something of this self-contradiction, reflected in the fact that Dryden was, it seems, though a silent, withdrawn man, very decidedly loved and hated: sweetly commemorated by Congreve, beaten up verbally and physically by the Duke of Buckingham and others. When the poet Rochester ...”

“... to hit the Statue of Liberty.’) Among Obama’s precursors is certainly Oprah Winfrey, the only self-made woman billionaire in America, who has built her television and magazine empire by assuming the role of an upbeat friend, helping you to help yourself. Obama’s slogan ‘Yes we can!’ is Oprah’s essential message; and it’s worth noting that some ...”

“... some days before the Fourth Plenum, when he responded to the charges against him with 11 points of self-defence, key among them that the students’ demands had not posed a threat to Party rule and that the crisis could have been settled peacefully if the other leaders had accepted his advice to withdraw the label ‘turmoil’ (i.e. riot) used in the 26 April ...”

“... inheritor of the oldest continuous history in the world, whose underlying cultural unity and self-confidence are without equal. Long before the West, its rulers created the first modern bureaucracy, imbued with a Confucian outlook at once authoritarian and democratic, controlling domestic subjects more by moral education than force, and organising ...”

“... operations aimed at ‘winning hearts and minds’ – as if these phrases were not shrouded in self-parody, as if the strategy they describe had not ended in catastrophe. Public memory is short. Outside policy circles, one might hope to find a richer repository of inconvenient truths. Yet here too the results are disappointing. A few novelists have made ...”

“... and rhythm: ‘The end of choice, the last of hope’, an effect so Larkinesque as to border on self-parody. Poetic metaphor flickers back into life … In stanzas six and seven metaphor stands on its head as the ‘real’, dull ordinary world takes on the glowing inaccessibility of a Grecian urn or mythical Byzantium: ‘Red brick, lagged pipes, and ...”

“... and physical sciences doesn’t mention him at all. Other books, more than a few of them self-published, link him with secret plots involving free energy, anti-gravity propulsion, the supposed technologies of the pharaohs, mind control and time travel. His most fruitful years coincided with the discovery of X-rays, radioactivity and the electron, and ...”

“... they are beyond the design flaws of humanity’, although the profits of the pharmaceutical or self-help industries might suggest otherwise. In Paris (where I live) he sees cartoon figures: ‘the men in salmon-coloured pants and white linen and bright sweaters tied around their necks, the men who disappeared around corners and circled back in luxury ...”

“... than pernicious.27 February. Good piece in this morning’s Guardian, a discussion between Will Self and Stewart Lee in which the latter describes the hostile reaction he sometimes has to face from audiences. At one point, ‘a guy got really angry. He said it wasn’t the audience’s fault they didn’t get what I was doing and I should be better at my ...”