“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... harpies. ‘The Death of the Lion’ is narrated in the first person by Paraday’s nameless, self-appointed protector, a journalist sent to poke around in his domestic life. He fails to produce the ‘personal’ (‘that dreadful word!’) exposé he has been commissioned to write. Instead, he falls under his subject’s spell and composes a ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... of ‘psychological’ explanations of social failure and contempt for those who ‘wallowed’ in self-analysis are wholly out of tune with the current explosion of ‘counselling’ (the fastest-growing of the new parapsychological professions). Her suggestion that in certain circumstances wage-reductions were a necessary tool of rational economic planning ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Aires. She is wearing a soaking wet dress and a pair of fluffy slippers. She tells us with some self-deprecation that her job is taking rich foreigners to see private art collections. On this occasion, she had been sheltering from the rain waiting for her clients when a car ‘came past hugging the kerb and drenched me and my pristine yellow dress’. The ...”

“... just taken up that loneliest of occupations, doctoral research in the humanities: three years of self-exile in libraries and archives, hard-up and haunted by doubt. My girlfriend had gone to study in Russia, and I’d never felt more isolated or adrift. Every morning I’d cycle to my college and sit in the ancient library, situated above the ...”

“... into the fire as a baby at the urging of an apparition. But the Beldam turns out to be heroically self-sacrificing. Her unflagging sense of humour is heroic too: she stares down the courthouse as she’s sentenced ‘with a look that says, this entertains me too’.Blakemore’s claim that the past is a realm of ethical ‘foregone conclusions’ is obviously ...”

“... I’ve paid my dues.’ Jones just shook his head, as though amazed at the depth of our shared self-deception, and then said: ‘You people have fucked the whole thing up. When we get there we’re going to do things differently.’ I remember sitting there thinking, ‘He’s confusing class and race. To get “there” he has to become us, and us is not ...”

“... Donald Bowman, James David Hamel and J.D. Vance, now strangely rebranded without the stops, is a self-styled ‘hillbilly’ whose backwoods was Middletown, Ohio, an industrial suburb of Cincinnati (pop. 50,987), where he went from poverty to Yale Law School. He wrote a bestselling book excoriating poor white people for being lazy and not as ...”