“... The furniture is mostly junk: rusted garden chairs, uneven tables, unstuffed sofas, and more self-consciously devised cement benches set with broken tiles, candle-holders fashioned out of milk cartons, that kind of thing. You can get weak Austin beer, or Newcastle Brown Ale, or cappuccinos; nobody will notice if you spend all day there and order ...”

“... that bordered on relief, that he wasn’t going to manage.’ It is difficult to write these self-diagnoses without making them sound either portentous or inauthentic. Miller’s skill in manipulating his characters’ psychological states is impressive, but he tends to allow interior monologue to do too much work. ...”

“... I tried to find a temporary shorthand for the effect of Upstream Colour. The characters are quiet, self-contained, even self-absorbed; they are consumed by a project they themselves do not understand; and after a while their off-beat world begins to seem like a place any of us could inhabit. Well, inhabit on one of our ...”

“... recognisable to us now. In her writings, Walker drops her masks; her voice is immediate, at once self-lacerating and self-protective as she confronts her critics. No doilies, no frills; art as armour for mind and body: I make art for white boys to feel up their sisters at no. no shame. I make art for white girls to finger ...”

“... not religious themselves, and their explanations are not intended to be compatible with the self-understanding of those who are. Even if scientific explanations predict the persistence of religion, they tend to undermine any claim to the truth of religious beliefs. They are essentially explanations of religion from the outside, and are thought to ...”

“... communication. He was what was known at the time as a ‘thruster’, referring to his efforts at self-promotion and advancement rather than his military tactics. He met the Ottoman forces in an indecisive and costly battle, then found that he had nothing to fall back on when the Ottomans counterattacked under the inspired leadership of Khalil Pasha. The ...”

“... men of history. One of The Book of Saladin’s weaknesses was its stock characters: the heroic, self-denying general; the irreverent but faithful old retainer; the comically self-important academic. The characterisation in The Stone Woman is subtler: Mariam, for example, the cruel wife of Nilofer’s brother Salman, has a ...”

“... in which performance is everything, or everything you can know for sure. There is another self beyond the current action perhaps, beyond the disguise – a hard-working patriot behind the glamour and the sex, for example. But Wong can’t securely find that self any more than we can see it on the screen: it’s just ...”

“... the subsidies and political protection that make the Israeli occupation and the high-handed and self-defeating policies it engenders possible, there is little, if any, reason to hope that anything resembling the former peace process can be resurrected.’ Words like these are rarely spoken in public in Washington, and anyone who does use them is almost ...”

“... the common and indivisible homeland of all Spaniards’ as well as guaranteeing ‘the right to self-government of the nationalities and regions of which it is composed’. This process was easier for the ‘historical nationalities’ of Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia than for the rest. Although the autonomous regions had more powers than they ...”

“... book, Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, blends a defence of patriarchal tradition with self-help and psychoanalytic mysticism, drawing on Carl Jung and religious fables to produce such peculiar tips as ‘Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street,’ alongside more menacing advice on how to physically discipline your child. His public profile ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as ‘key workers’ – her daughter, for example, who had tested positive for the virus and was self-isolating in Dover.I first visited Thanington early last year as an example of a poor white working-class district in which the majority had voted for Britain to leave the EU. It has a mixture of council and private housing and an estimated population 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 ...”

“... the Baltic coast, he studied painting in Copenhagen and in 1798 moved to Dresden, the so-called or self-styled ‘Florence on the Elbe’, where he died in 1840. A major retrospective of his work is currently on show at the Kunsthalle in Hamburg (until 1 April). It commemorates the 250th anniversary of his birth and will travel across the Atlantic next year to ...”