“... 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 ...”

“... the heart branches with its                     wild arteries – I own my self, I own my leaving – the falcon watching from the tree – I shall torch the crop that no one else                     have it whispers the air – & someone’s swinging from a rope, his rope – the eye ...”

“... or rather it was moving that no one thought about. We were each happy in the round cell of our self-determination, attentively falling out of love with the atrium of tomorrow, its muscle, its derring-do. The Situation Upstairs Like a forest fire in a jungle with no one to watch it, this sea breeze releases me to the cloud of knowing. There are beaters in ...”

“... which soon I shall turn into a pen again – brilliantly negligent, diligent, inside all this self truly formless – I hear the laughter of the irrigation ditch I’ve made, I see the dry field blonde-up and green, day smacks its lips, they are back, the inventors, they are going to do it again, sprinkle-seed, joker rain coming to loosen it all. How ...”

“... batted together the parts of the sycamore stick she had broken in two and then made of them the self-important capital letter T – and she spun one.     She rolled the stick over her thumb and then she tried for greater twirling speed, as she sat on the park bench that bore a personalised inscribed plaque dedicated to MY DEAREST NANCY.     She is not ...”

“... when it is mentioned, Catholicism serves as a context for intellectual rather than spiritual self-examination. Ernst Untzinger, an EC bureaucrat of uncertain sexuality, ponders his own compulsive materialism and laments the fact that even when he visits the Pope he can’t help calculating his worldly riches (‘life-proprietor of the Sistine ...”

“... of the sort: ‘I, a Cretan, assert that all Cretans are liars.’ Deconstructive propositions are self-falsifying because they are presented in natural language; they are, moreover, not a stimulating mental game but a soul-destroying heresy. Real Presences traces this subversion of language and faith to the period between 1870 and 1930. Before that was ...”

“... long stretches his writing, where it’s not show-off clever, is appallingly careless. The plot is self-indulgently romantic, and Stern’s escapades in Africa are about as believable as Indiana Jones’s. Much of the narrative is propelled by petty spites (against feminism, notably). But with all its faults, News from Nowhere seems to me to be that rarest of ...”

“... book, or is this all just a waste of time?’ I reassured him. In view of Shelton’s immature self-assurance (he has just described the Dylan-Baez relationship as ‘one of the most intriguing show-business liaisons of the times’, a phrase fatally unaware of what the word ‘intriguing’ might imply), readers of this book, too, may need reassurance. I ...”