“... by his inability to find a real style to go with his success) is perhaps his most complicatedly self-lacerating: there is a clear suggestion that the man’s downfall has more to do with Scotland than with him. But then, on the other hand, who’d want to be an English pouf? There is no figure in Williams’s books who is both big-time and ...”

“... the cult of the Virgin, an insult to organised religion, a criticism of contemporary society and a self-abasing admission that the artist, as a good member of the juste-milieu, has compromised his integrity by selling out to the forces of reaction. Boime supposes that the mural on the left of the altar, the Stella Maris, is a comment on the failure of the ...”

“... which was approaching the exciting climax to a remarkable and peaceful quest for greater political self-determination. Scotland’s nationalism – expressed most vividly in the extraordinary ten-year advance of the Scottish National Party under its Home Rule banner, but striking a strong chord, too, in Labour, Conservative and Liberal support for political ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and Nesaule part-time and illegally, because she was underage. Worse than poverty was the self-doubt that came from having been thought ‘not even worth feeding’ as a child. It was as humiliating as a number tattooed on the wrist. Nesaule never believed that anyone at her American school could want to be friends with her. Once, when she was ill ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... a way, an American version of Lord Kitchener of Khartoum. Certainly, he had Kitchener’s sense of self-esteem and self-assurance, his personal identification with the imperial enterprise, his belief in his own indispensability, and his disdain for politicians who didn’t share his views. How (if at all) contemporary ...”

“... 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. ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... nitrogen cycle had been transformed. Before the fertiliser boom, nitrogen cycles were localised, self-sustaining systems. Guano mania changed that. Depriving millions of seabirds of their nesting habitats and local communities of an agricultural resource, nitrogen raided from millennia-old deposits in the Americas was now sent across the world to improve the ...”

“... a solution to the problem of having a shameful identity that lurked in the deepest recesses of the self. This idea of knowing two things at the same time has been essential to gay people in other ways. Gay people have known that our sexuality was actually, despite what we read or were told, quite normal, quite natural; it was only the world that thought ...”

“... of the gods, daring to ask the one forbidden question, the renunciation of love for power, genital self-mutilation as the price of magic: Wagner’s work is everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits reached and exceeded. ‘Wagnerian’ has passed into our language as a byword for the exorbitant, the over-scaled and the ...”