“... 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 ...”

“... A small Korean water sprinkler made of white porcelain some time in the 17th or 18th century sits self-possessed among the heftier stoneware. Inevitable, and modest, with a tiny hole at the top for filling and a correspondingly tiny beak of a lip for pouring, it would sit perfectly in the hand, and embodies the ideals of Mingei. It comes from the collection ...”

“... the Griddle, the largest UK exhibition of her paintings to date. The show opened with a late nude Self-Portrait (1980), completed four years before her death. Neel paints herself perched on a blue-and-white-striped chair, her white hair swept up in a grandmotherly bun. Her body is outlined in the same blue as the chair, and she wears nothing but a pair of ...”

“... of their fellow countrymen and ‘influence the course of national policy’. ‘The British self-governing Dominions – Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa – feel with us that Britain is geographically and historically a part of Europe, and that they also have their inheritance in Europe,’ Churchill continued. ‘If Europe united is to be ...”

“... writ would be people he wouldn't mind meeting. At the time, I was kneeling on the floor with a self-assembly bookshelves kit, wondering why they'd given me only nine nuts for ten bolts, and just when he'd said that, about the two churches, I realised that the alarm bell on the used-car garage which had been ringing since Friday night had stopped. For the ...”

“... of, Everything accumulated ever As I took squarings from the tops of bridges Or the banks of self at evening. Lick of fear. Sweet transience. Flirt and splash. Crumpled flow the sky-dipped willows trailed in. All gone into the world of light? Perhaps As we read the line sheer forms do crowd The starry vestibule. Otherwise They do not. What lucency ...”

“... and now it hangs, Hangs for dear life onto its fine brown ghost. Clinging exhausted to its former self, Its head flung back as if to watch the moon, The blue-green veins pulsing along its wing, The thing unwraps itself, but falls too soon. The ants are tiny and their work is swift – The insect-shark is washed up on their land – While the sea sounds ...”

“... The Grief Maps You find the manuals (‘How to Mourn’) on Borders’ Self-Help shelves. ‘Imagine this to be your Trail Guide in a park. Starting from Point Death, the paths available are Numbness, Shock, Denial. They lead to Loneliness, Confusion; visions of black lorries dashing by on the M25 each with a hole in its black side like the last piece missing from a jigsaw: sable icebergs calving in the Sea of Desolation ...”