“... but he saw them. Which also shows how enticing it was to sit for him. Because even though I felt self-conscious about my appearance, the very act of sitting was irresistible.’She liked the evening sessions best. They would begin with a longish stretch – fifty minutes or so – then break for tea in the kitchen and do a shorter stint before dinner. He ...”

“... dozens of insurrections have been launched, for the most part by ethnic minority groups seeking self-determination and later autonomy within a federal system. Until now, these conflicts have largely been confined to the seven ‘ethnic states’ on the country’s western, northern and eastern/southeastern borders. Now, PDFs are striking at the Bamar ...”

“... against the colonial government which soon fused with broader movements for land reform and self-rule. Even the British expressed a modicum of guilt about their transformation of the Punjab. A Canal Colonies Report of 1933 lamented the replacement of the ‘goat herd’s pipe and the quavering love-song of the camel men’ with ‘the klaxon of the ...”

“... irritated by the need to tiptoe around Lyle, who is the older man’s long-term companion and self-appointed protector from their previous asylum. Edric hints at their relationship through a series of small but eloquent gestures: Lyle resting a hand on Gurney’s shoulder is enough to bring one of Irvine’s precious interviews to a close. Barely into his ...”

“... rather differently. Parody is a loving form of attack. Me Cheeta is a shaggy-dog story, one that self-consciously sabotages its chosen genre. It hates Hollywood, it hates its stars, and yet, like Cheeta and his keepers, at the end of the day it settles down to the silver nitrate glow of a classic American movie. Only a film buff would have been able to ...”

“... as well as by Chaucer: the patient Griselda, a complex figure in Chaucer, is here a model of ‘self-control, moral probity, piety, stalwart loyalty to her mate, humility, temperance, chastity and patience’. Another tale familiar from The Canterbury Tales, that of Melibee, sees a vengeful husband threatening his household’s welfare, while his ...”

“... men against the far right and the police, was to blame local tensions on the Asian propensity for self-segregation. There were years of authoritarian exhortations to embrace ‘Britishness’. But, as the Blairite columnist Dan Hodges has argued, ‘trying to ape the language of the BNP succeeded only in boosting the BNP.’ It also gave Cameron the ...”

“... These were the convention’s three slogans. The first is risky in a country with evident self-esteem issues. The second puts the opponent’s name at its centre. The last doesn’t appeal to individualists who think they’re stronger when they own guns. Before the convention could shift into Hillary hagiography, there had to be a reconciliation with ...”

“... 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 ...”