“... features strongly reminiscent of those favoured by his teacher Perugino. But a famous supposed self-portrait, the first exhibit in this show, already shows surprising assurance. A study for the head of an apostle (possible St Thomas) in the ‘Transfiguration’ (c.1519) Raphael’s style and his approach to drawing was transformed by his period in ...”

“... on Bhairava, a penitent Brahma rejoiced: the encounter with divine violence shattered his self-regard, which had grown to eclipse the ultimate truth. He was, suddenly, enlightened. An 18th-century thangka of the deities Chakrasamvara and Vajrayogini. Near the entrance to the British Museum’s Tantra exhibition (until 24 January, temporarily ...”

“... those with the seniority to read them.’ This isn’t a gesture of hostility or exclusion, but self-determination. Despite the artists’ desire to create works that travel between cultures, these paintings have not been made for us. The viewer is a guest; any pretence of disclosure or easy understanding would prevent us from experiencing the vertigo of ...”

“... inner argument between what I like to think of as my superego and the voice of my defeated younger self. The first tells me in a firm voice, and rather witheringly, that I must not only swim forty lengths a day but the lengths must be swum according to a routine, alternately crawl and backstroke, and the backstroke evenly divided between the use of both arms ...”

“... have been the stronger element, he made his way to England – the year before Ceylon attained self-government – to Nottingham, where he went on to obtain a doctorate in (almost inevitably) the poetry of Lawrence. His first teaching post was in Singapore, the next (I recall reluctantly writing a reference for him) in Belfast, then Sussex, and finally, in ...”

“... a piece of paper seems to have triumphed not only over sedulous corruption but even over simple self-preservation. Whether this or some even more worrying ground of over-confidence was the reason, it looks like another vindication of the cock-up theory of history – a theory which two decades of practice in public and constitutional law have begun to ...”

“... puts it, and there were three more children. The True Confession, by turns grand and grandiose, self-accusing and self-regarding, serious and punning, was essentially a poetical goodbye letter. What can one say of Elizabeth Smart more than that she loved a poet who by the conventional standards they both rejected treated ...”

“... and could not arouse true love, because ‘one could only worship that which was above one’s self.’ Such foolishness was reinforced by the Dean of New College, whose sermons were poisoned by misogyny. In a sermon delivered during Ned’s second year, the dean said of women: ‘Inferior to us God made you, and inferior to the end you will ...”

“... combination of gentleman and player, a Coghill who inhabits an academy innocent of competition, self-serving and self-display. It may seem a Utopian fancy, but I think Wain locates it in a magical, rather Arnoldian Oxford that somehow existed alongside the real one, in the good old days. The old days, indeed, preoccupy ...”

“... a man to keep the peace and jails him for life for making a mistake in the heat of the action. Our self-important and ineffectual MPs have let this matter lie. Apart from a case argued on BBC Television in favour of the creation of lesser penalties to meet such occasions, the only protest on the subject that I have heard has come from a spokesman in Ulster who ...”

“... debriefing at the hands of MI5. This theory, however, is vulnerable to that deadly comment on all self-justifying testimony – Mandy Rice-Davies’s ‘He would, wouldn’t he?’ Bitov himself has been the most prolific source of conflicting versions of his disappearance in Venice, his appearance in London and his reappearance in Moscow, with each story ...”

“... range and variety of reference are exceptional. She also writes, some of the time, with a fervid, self-indulgent miscellaneousness, in a kind of spray of allusions. There are too many one- and two-sentence paragraphs in this book: too many asides appropriate to a lecture, but making for jerky reading on the page. It must be said, indeed, that disjointedness ...”

“... He enjoys describing his love affairs, but compared with Boswell’s activities these show great self-restraint. He did not have a Dr Johnson to provide sagacious advice about freeing himself from paternal influence. In fact, as those who have seen A Voyage Round My Father on television will realise, this would have been an impossibility, since it is clear ...”

“... case, they demonstrate, even at their most hysterical, something different from casting one’s self on a tide of words – especially symbolic epithets like ‘black’ and ‘white’, ‘wet’ and ‘cold’ – and trusting to half-remembered cadences out of Shakespeare and Yeats to convey the illusion of meaning. Not the least ardent of Sue Lenier’s ...”

“... however, is remarkable for a style which arches brilliantly between sociological observation and self-delighting irony. This introductory paragraph is emblematic of her technique: Getting a buzz off the stones of Bath, occupying a conspicuous site not fifty yards from the mysterious, chthonic aperture from which the hot springs bubble out of the inner ...”