“... hold out: ‘Our biggest surprise,’ he said, ‘is that juche (Kim II Sung’s strategy of ‘self-reliance’) actually seems to work – if at a very high cost.’ But reunification will also proceed cautiously because the participants recognise that, while the process will lead to the disappearance of only one state (the North), it could bring about ...”

“... all internal opposition: high-tech Japan is leading the world into ‘a fantastic dystopia of self-emptied, idea-vacated, and purpose-lost production, consumption, and daydreaming’. Miyoshi has a distinct advantage when it comes to making such sweeping statements because, as a former Japanese subject, now a naturalised US citizen, he really is both an ...”

“... concerns the role of the Wets. This chapter, ‘Why the Moderates Lost’, involves some painful self-examination. Lord Gilmour, who admits to ‘grave dereliction of duty’, asks himself whether the Wets could have done anything else. He concludes that he himself should have resigned at the time of the 1981 Budget, and not awaited dismissal at the end of ...”

“... it is the lodger who has disappeared. When sections of these houses are rented they are made self-contained. What makes Halle’s book refreshing for readers outside his discipline is that it considers art in its domestic context. Only in this way, he says, ‘can its meaning for an audience, and the nature of its links with material and social life, he ...”

“... autobiography. Obsession with meat-eating goes back to the emergence of a modern, élite, Indian self-consciousness in Bengal in the mid-19th century; here, though, the thrust was in the opposite direction, and was at once more radical and innocent than Gandhi’s vegetarianism; several educated Bengalis (frequently lampooned by other Bengalis) championed ...”

“... enjoyed avoiding all family meals and eating alone. I envied her that. She seemed to me unusually self-sufficient in those days, though I noticed that she had a weakness for romantic films, musicals and, to my surprise, sophisticated women’s magazines – Vogue, Harpers, even the Tatler – in which she glanced addictively at a world that, so I ...”

“... Ray altered the landscape of visual representation in major ways. But the real achievement of its self-styled leader (the subject of Mark Polizzotti’s biography) is questionable. It is difficult not to find oneself writing biliously about so self-righteously bilious a man as André Breton. It is perhaps no accident ...”

“... to take an interest in writers and writing. So even the relatively peripheral movements of a self-consciously minor figure like Gay require for their useful exposition a lot of information about his betters. Like his famous friends, Gay professed to deplore the delays, snubs and false promises of patrons, but his persistence in seeking the offices and ...”

“... he believes are giants – there eight or nine elaborate negotiations between the extravagant self and the only slightly less extravagant world. Is this inn a castle? No, but everyone, and not just Don Quixote, is prepared to talk as if it is. Is this shining object a barber’s basin or Mambrino’s helmet? It’s a barber’s basin, but the barber is ...”

“... sympathy. Powered by them, he sets out to overcome ‘law’ in the bad old sense – formalistic, self-referential, supposedly autonomous law of the sort his generation and mine were taught at law school and read in the judgments of a judicial generation which has now passed on. This is a task which today is a great deal easier than overcoming sex, because ...”

“... strange miracles with perception and with language, so that in verses pared almost to the bone the self and objects in view become at the same time distinct and interfused: There is a blessing in the air, Which seems a sense of joy to yield To the bare trees, and mountains bare, And grass in the green field. But a mild March morning, like the one the ...”

“... attitude towards the profession on the first is at odds with his participation in the Bar’s self-satisfaction over the second. The Bar’s howl of rage at the end of the Eighties at the plans of a government for whom most of its members had voted to introduce more competition into the provision of legal services, and to cut out restrictive ...”

“... Proust despised for having supposed in his philistinism that the writer’s social and creative self were one and the same, that the person you dined and talked with in the cafés or salons was the same person who went home and wrote the Fleurs du mal or Madame Bovary. Proust insisted on two selves for the true writer, a surface ...”

“... in a cinema, was, significantly, Coriolanus. Mrs Melville, wife of the vicar of Stratford, a self-confessed Fascist and anti-semite who vigorously opposed the inclusion of the Soviet flag at the Birthday ceremonies, was a governor of the Shakespeare Theatre and must therefore have had a hand in the choice of Birthday play, the hero of which shared her ...”

“... photocopied typescripts of the Sigma project, launched in 1964 by novelist, junkie and self-described ‘cosmonaut of inner space’, the late Alexander Trocchi. Sigma was meant to revolutionise the planet: to bring together cultural dissidents from all over the West, until their various schemes and finally their single voice, seductive and ...”