“... 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 ...”

“... gives them a compelling honesty and edge. In his novels, he sought to explore the parts of the self which most of us seek to conceal. He was also concerned with style, with how you write a sentence, how you control the music and rhythms of prose. Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924, the eldest of a large family. His father died when he was 19. ‘On the ...”

“... the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and screeching, the mechanical gouging that attends the uncivil engineering projects that ...”

“... forcefulness, though the play does sometimes get lost in the twists and turns of its hero’s self-study,’ or ‘As would be expected in Kant, the central argument on space and time is pursued with great – at times trying – subtlety, not to say a positive delight in showing that contrary arguments always end in logical impasse.’I am being ...”

“... David Bindman, who has studied the picture closely for thirty years, proposed that it is in fact a self-portrait, painted by Williams himself.What is the intent of the image and what is created by its beholders? The problem of Francis Williams’s portrait shows the degree to which personal identity depends on both. Three hundred years after Williams lived, it ...”

“... from the first, neither botany nor calligraphy. Even at his least traditional and generic, he is self-subduing, and his line can at times give a sense of costraint, which evokes the disciplines of a craft, and other disciplines too. But he is present, he expressed himself, in everything he did. His floral work can be consulted in books and in museums, and ...”

“... home- produced. The tribal creature is alone With only tribal words to help him blend His uncloned self with all humanity. But metaphor is often out of date. I find a powerful trope: ‘the straitjacket Of all our childhoods’, but I’ve never seen A straitjacket – drugged, behind a screen, The madman of today can raise a racket And none of it will reach ...”

“... world, at speed, the river beneath, always trying to beat his record,With me beside him in that self-same seat, the blur of tail fins, cables, skyThrough that curvilinear windshield, across bridges for the most part, but not just.Every year Murph would flip cars, trading in the 88 for a 98 Custom Sports Coup,345 horsepower Starface engine, dual rear ...”

“... come fast and smudged). There was low-pitched music on a loop-tape and snaps of herself, in that self-same dress, with dancing partners who had about them a feverish look, a touch of delirium: just what he felt each time she drew him in. He turned in his sleep. Her breasts were honeycombs and her womb a hive. The Queen in Rapture A summer of storms. A ...”

“... is multiplied. Looking at things closely leads to wondering what they are called. The sporadic self-education in natural history that goes with picking up pretty pebbles, shells and plants on country walks, and noticing the fauna, sometimes calls for my kind of optics. We are not like the old ornithologists who made their identifications from dead ...”