“... he suggests, saw Italian art ‘more as a repository of motifs and ideas than as a coherent, self-conscious system of artistic values’. Or again, writing of the influence of Rubens, Brown notes the advantages as well as the limitations of what he calls ‘second-hand stylistic transmission’. ‘The Spanish painters were inspired but not limited by ...”

“... the New Forum and the Peace and Human Rights movement. They wanted a humane, democratic GDR, a self-governing civil society and not a Western takeover. Jens Reich, one of the most intelligent and sympathetic figures of the New Forum, has said that he first experienced a GDR identity after the overthrow of Honecker and Krenz. In the year that followed few ...”

“... Louis Seynaeve, who is ten years old at the time of Munich, grows up in an enclosed and self-righteous little community in Catholic West Flanders. The Seynaeves are anti-semitic (though until the outbreak of war Louis has never set eyes on a Jew), anti-socialist, anti-French, anti-Protestant, anti-Brussels and anti-government. Their right-wing ...”

“... that morning was of German professional competence and decent seriousness and British self-love and exhibitionism. Not everyone has admired Lord Hailsham as he unquestionably admires himself. The tone is beautifully echoed in Hailsham’s account of his meeting with Khrushchev. ‘Khrushchev was a countryman to his fingertips. The only man I have ...”

“... and again in popular science books, and there is not much new here. What is new is Weinberg’s self-conscious concern for philosophical issues such as the nature of explanation, the sense in which an explanation or theory may be said to be ‘final’, and whether the end-product of science is a nice-sounding, though possibly false, story about nature, or ...”

“... enemies – a teddybear, his name – and anyone may be his enemy. He and his chums contemplate self-defence against a teacher who likes to grip their balls while asking them questions – but what’s even the One-Two Punch against someone who’s got you by the balls? His dissertation on conkers says everything about the ruses of seniority in these ...”

“... took a wrong turning: The new Cartesian distinction between the res cogitans, or thinking self, and the res extensa, or embodied substance, sets up the terms for the objectivity of science and [its] abstraction from historicity, location, nature and culture. What interests us about Descartes in this context is the fact that he sought to empower the ...”

“... a ‘panicky bullying of the boat’ – which confronts each crew member with his or her truest self. Sea voyages, of course, are apt and ancient metaphors for life and for the eternal questing of artists, and the most venerable of these is invoked on the second page: An uncertain passage in the Odyssey has Tiresias speaking of a land without ...”

“... to Carlos Serrano in 1961. In that letter he speaks of a ‘constant struggle between the need for self-expression and the desire for self-effacement’. Renoir is everywhere in his films, even in the places we least expect him to be. He is not only the film-maker but also the object of his makings; it is as if there were ...”

“... salvation is contained in Scripture alone; that the message of Scripture is single, coherent and self-validating; and that it had been perverted by churchly forms, traditions and innovations from some date after its delivery in Palestine to the time of Martin Luther and the other 16th-century reformers, who broke the mould and put things right. I am not sure ...”

“... career with zealous rage. Meeting, in his dream, a contemporary who now earns his crust by penning self-serving memoirs of the Thirties, Highwood says to him: ‘I may not have read every article you’ve written or television talk you’ve given about the Thirties, but I have read and heard more than a few, and there wasn’t one that didn’t completely ...”

“... Kali, in the other the Old One, eat their prey – the difference being that Taliesin’s previous self Gwion runs away from the Old One, whereas Vikram offers himself up to Kali willingly, hoping to outwit her. The cauldron in which Vikram is cooked to a crisp replicates ‘the fluid darkness’ of the Old One’s womb, and both stories of pain and loss of ...”

“... 1964/70 Labour Government. It is impossible not to wonder whether, had Brown been marginally more self-controlled, he could have persuaded Wilson to devalue in 1965 or 1966. Had he done so, the history of the 1964 Government would almost certainly have been very different. Instead of being a failure by its own self imposed ...”

“... nationalism finally triumphed in the Republic of Ireland, and the state settled down as a dull and self-satisfied monolith. The old Protestant business class, Beckett’s class, would then lose all its power. The writing is self-conscious: it reads as though the writer wrote it merely to read it himself. And indeed he did ...”

“... genius confined him to what Henry James called the madness of art, since that is exclusive, self-inflicted, entirely wilful and implicit with the grandiosity of the child laying claim to his domain. Francine du Plessix Gray, in this wildly partisan and thoroughly enjoyable biography of Colet, whom she attempts to reinstate as a female icon and ‘yet ...”