“... admirably researched and written, and quietly subversive. It asks how much deceit – and how much self-deception on the part of the global anti-apartheid movement – might be revealed by a closer look at the liberation struggle and the dawn of the ‘New South Africa’. Quite a lot, it turns out. Outsiders have been eager to find a moral lesson in the ...”

“... romance of the Italian movie, and neither Johnson nor Howard can compete with Hepburn in self-possession – indeed who could? But the sheer misery in the ordinariness of these lives, a grand passion conducted in and out of the dingy buffet bar of a small railway station, is magnetic. Johnson especially is remarkable, telling her story in voice-over ...”

“... exaggerations of broadcasting conventions and their cheerful disdain for moral panics and media self-aggrandisement. Brass Eye was celebrated for hoaxing politicians and celebrities: several hapless Tories, plus Rolf Harris and Noel Edmonds, filmed impassioned warnings against a fictitious drug called ‘cake’ which affected, Edmonds said, ‘the part of ...”

“... her tics, her drinking, her impatience, her snobbery, is a sort of saga of denial, the ragged, self-contradicting consciousness of someone who can’t afford to think about what she knows. In these last moments of the film, we have to feel something like sympathy for her, what else would we feel? But her story and her condition, even in this ...”

“... But it also seems to chime with the world of social media and online communication, where self-expression rules and echo chambers proliferate. The internet is much more effective as a vehicle for expressing disgust with mainstream politics than it is for organising pragmatic reconfigurations of it. Corbyn might be a reminder of the 1980s in some of ...”

“... lights as part of a royal motorcade. When we arrived, the prince seemed more ruddy-faced and self-alienated than before, and I wondered if words had been exchanged, but I have no evidence and can only say that we walked in procession to Poets’ Corner, surrounded by a very packed house of the clearly-having-been-kept-waiting. Forrest Gump, eat your ...”

“... committed him to being interested in every sort of phenomenon, while the buoyancy of his own self-belief meant that the investigations seldom lapsed into mere principle. Like Leonardo, he thought about morphologies: the way carnivore bodies variegate, for example, in the Tiger, Lion and Leopard Hunt from the Musée des beaux-arts in Rennes, one of two ...”

“... Scottish television and being sufficiently aware of their own capabilities to know the dangers of self-determination. But after three excruciating decades, these divisions eventually resolved themselves into a Scottish Parliament which has struggled to live up to expectations. Richard Leonard, elected as the new leader of Scottish Labour last month, ran on a ...”

“... to date, showing until 29 August – sharp-bobbed Eileen Agar, 28 years old, looks out from Self-Portrait (1927) as if pondering her next move. In her autobiography, A Look at My Life, she described this as her ‘first successful work’, though it gives little indication of the direction she was to take only a few years later. Beyond the opening ...”

“... a tool for anxiety relief and relaxation, amateur in style but extremely lucrative for independent self-described ASMRtists. For others, it’s a strange and unappealing fetish: a cynical form of ‘digital intimacy’. It’s the best, or the worst, the internet has to offer.Fanatics don’t always agree about what precisely ASMR is. The curators at the ...”

“... play. Keith Ogilvie, Francis Mayne’s lover and exploiter, is always writing to Tariq Ali in his self-serving careerist way, and perhaps it will transpire in novels to come that the latter becomes presenter and producer of Channel 4’s Bandung File: but no one’s sense of Britain will be changed by this, or by the idea that 1968 radicals have to a ...”

“... She is definitely not nobody, and the writings collected here are imbued with a calm self-confidence that turns out to be her salient characteristic. It rests on the conviction that she can tell right from wrong. She has always acted accordingly, without any soul-searching or fuss. This is what her Prussian upbringing taught her. Or so she seems ...”

“... opposite: resistance to ‘exported’ foreign domination. Omar Cabezas’s vigorous, funny and self-deprecating account of his four-year odyssey in the mountains of northern Nicaragua as a young guerrilla volunteer expresses the spirit of Sandinismo more fully than any other available work in English. For obvious historical reasons the shelves of English ...”

“... In time, he lost his journalist’s job. He’d lived in the shadow of his successful father – self-made, writer of ripping yarns, fifty years editor of The Wide World. And we got poorer in a time when dole was not the norm. Later – a short-term job – educational précis took him to London’s technical libraries. I went with him in the ...”

“... character of limited intelligence and scant scruple, remarkable only for his gigantic powers of self-deception. But no amount of academic documentation is likely to dissuade people a hundred years hence from seeing him as the very mirror of a tragic prince – an ikon of modern royalty as exemplified by Sickert’s dazzling portrait painted, at the time of ...”