“... in 1603. His response couldn’t have been more terse: ‘to imitate natural things well’. The self-cancelling brushstrokes ‘belonged not to him, but to nature’, he is also reported to have said. Minimal directives like these don’t close the discussion, however – they provoke it. What, then, is nature? Does it extend to the textures of ...”

“... the ‘inland sea’ is the Mediterranean, and it is a vessel of people – her migrant self, or Syrian refugees – that lands, or almost lands, precariously on the shelf or shoreline. This is deft work, and we can admire it as we admire a great technician, but Stallings is also making a philosophical point: the reality is that metaphor, true to ...”

“... his skill at managing effects, and for the medium, then only about fifteen years old. The second self-portrait, one of the first photographs you encounter in the exhibition, is different and not. Fenton is half-seated on a table covered in a sheepskin rug and supporting a bottle of beer and a tankard; a rifle is cocked in his hands and pointed out to the ...”

“... makes the case for Smith as a poet of the page. In ‘how many of us have them?’ Smith uses a self-invented form, the ‘dozen’, whose 12 stanzas increase in length, a line at a time, from one to 12. It is inspired by a game known as ‘the dozens’, where two participants publicly insult each other until one of them gives up. (Smith includes some of ...”

“... the form of anti-EU parties). True, von der Leyen – now known in Brussels as ‘the minister for self-defence’ – was hauled in front of the European Parliament to account for the missing vaccine doses. But, just as in Germany, the grand coalition controlling the Parliament will perpetuate a culture of impunity.The problem is not just the lack of a real ...”

“... the Indigenous peoples’. It constituted an assault on their ‘freedom, legal and social rights, self-determination, self-sovereignty’. And, what’s more:Leaving out most people also meant that the society did not use or acknowledge or respect the creativity of most people, the intelligence of most people, the life ...”

“... treated no better than a West Indian slave. Escaping to the US, he sought to recover his sense of self and racial superiority by loudly supporting the South in the Civil War. As these examples illustrate, Anderson works hard to extract and convey stories of individuals from the uneven, abundant but mainly impersonal information that survives on punitive ...”

“... an oeil de boeuf window. It belongs to no school, though there is some affinity with another self-designed, but suburban, house of a very different painter, Roger Fry. The inclusion of this remote, largely unrecorded site is again testimony to Orbach’s determination and willingness to follow rutted, unmade, probably private roads through parched ...”

“... and programmatic works, music that invites the listener to imagine connotations beyond the self-contained logic of the piece. Their music often involves expansion of harmonic and orchestral resources – and, in the case of Wagner, radical new approaches to the relationship between music, text and theatre.Both factions claimed Beethoven as their ...”

“... world of natural theology with a world which offered much more room for individual initiative and self-improvement – a materialistic world where the rules were set by nature rather than God. Thus during the Reform Bill crisis of 1831-32, the Tory geologist Charles Lyell conflated his uneasiness about the atheistic science to which he had been exposed in ...”

“... but they are awkward fictional devices, Keith’s napalm sauce is in every way a bad joke, Sam’s self-questioning about whether the Crisis will reach the Conclusion an irritant driving one to almost Keithian reactions. The book’s ending, in which not Keith but Sam proves to be the murderer, parodies the conventions of the detective story effectively (they ...”

“... where their circumstances must be ‘less eligible’ than those of the lowest segment of self-supporting labour. Since in material terms the workhouse had to offer a sound roof and what was thought to be an adequate diet – features which many families of self-supporting labourers could not aspire to – it was ...”

“... as much a liability as an honour. But then Bishop herself seemed curiously uninterested in self-promotion. Much of her life was spent at what looks like a calculated distance from the literary and academic centres of power, lying doggo. Only towards the end did she return to Boston, where she had spent most of her childhood, to accept a post at nearby ...”

“... Milton Appel who has accused him of being a ‘Jewish shit ... carrying the hereditary curse of self-hate’, and says Zuckerman’s success was the product of ‘a vulgar imagination largely indifferent to social accuracy’. ‘Carnovsky’ may be identified as Portnoy’s Complaint and other names given to Lonoff and Appel, but the point is that the ...”

“... training for 28 years as a journalist in the lobbies of the Palace of Westminster. These self-indulgent memories came to mind some weeks ago when most of the newspapers were full of the libel action between Andrew Neil of the Sunday Times and Peregrine Worsthorne of the Sunday Telegraph. It came to be widely accepted that this trial represented a ...”