“... of the Ludi Magni might be a painting about painting, echoing Howard Hodgkin’s work. But where self-reflexiveness led Hodgkin into pathos, it exhilarates Ayres. Not haunted, as he was, by the ghosts of human figures, she reaches for her globs of paint as if to shout for shouting’s sake. The upwards tumbling torrent of A Belt of Straw and Ivy Buds ...”

“... stern, and suffused with Buddhist notions of impermanence, suffering and the abnegation of self, quite unlike Pickard’s conversational, often playful tone and distinctly unphilosophical outlook. He is curious, restless, anxious to get out on the fells, interested in the weather, topography, sky, birdlife (he’s a serious birder) and especially the ...”

“... curiosities, however, need no explanation. Gold borders dotted with insects, flowers and fruit are self-justifying embellishments; as are the creatures that take part in comic encounters (like the huge snail doing battle with a knight in the Fitzwilliam’s recently acquired 14th-century Macclesfield Psalter), or those that perch in marginal flourishes like ...”

“... even when he got mixed up with the Levellers in the later 1640s, resisted all the temptations to self-righteousness and to blind partisanship that the Revolution offered. His family, his library and his garden preserved his sense of proportion. So did his scientific interests, which led him, after the defeat of his political ideas, to devote his time to the ...”

“... critical style as he sees it – smooth, conversational, exhibiting a lack of original thought and self-reflection: ‘a civil art’, when Hartman feels admiring, ‘a civil jargon’ when he doesn’t. He can be stern on the subject; tea and totality don’t mix, he says, though the British are always trying to mix them. When critics like me try to ...”

“... dancing, and continuing through the rest of her performance, she had what appeared to be a small self-absorbed smile on her face, her mouth open more than is usual in a smile, as if she was privately contemplating her body, enjoying its movements. Her smile muted whatever tawdry theatricality attached to the scene and to her dance, purifying them by virtue ...”

“... in the West Indies.’ The African revival, as he sees it, may provide a ‘startling access of self-respect’, but can’t help West Indians to root themselves more firmly in the Caribbean. For Walcott, then, the first step towards creating a West Indian identity is to resist the meanings conferred by history or mythology since the histories and myths in ...”

“... many merits of Brading’s magisterial study that it focuses primarily on the opinions, fantasies, self-perceptions and moral outlook of our hero in his Spanish American habitat, as these changed (or did not change) over more than three and a half centuries. (How splendid if it would inspire self-consciously comparative ...”

“... in terms of any single school, but in terms of the immutable faith of the artist in his own inner self. Without this there is no art.’ Take out the ‘struggle’ bits, and scale down Greenberg’s own views of the ‘revolutionary’ potential of Pollock and de Kooning, and you have a defence of high-bourgeois artistic integrity: initially set against the ...”

“... abilities secured him the College’s organ scholarship during his first term, making for proud self-sufficiency at the price of a strenuous programme. Active in the Union, he became one of the leading Conservative speakers, but did not make a real splash until he broke with Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement after Munich. In the Oxford by-election of ...”

“... now lives in areas that are more than 90 per cent Protestant or 95 per cent Catholic.’ Ethnic self-cleansing: a war to unite the Irish nation has generated this cantonal reality of physical separation. The maintenance of central authority prevented large-scale ‘massacres and population movements’ like those of Bosnia, but could not stop a capillary ...”

“... such as the old-fashioned idea of full disclosure – has been permitted to challenge the self-interested ghouls who pay out their ration of ‘secrets’ in a niggardly and mysterious fashion as a form of individual and collective welfare. What if, I decided, what if, just for once, one read this output as if history mattered and as if the war of ...”

“... which apparently nothing can puncture – Baker’s own recent memoirs are one long purr of bland self-satisfaction.* It is startling to read that Parkinson – a man singled out by the Economist as an outstandingly bad minister – was her ideal Foreign Secretary. Parkinson was, after all, a not especially well educated small businessman, with no particular ...”

“... The man who composes the post-humous testament controls history. In the fraternal spirit of a self-confessed plagiarist, Home lets it be known that the whole thing was his theft in the first place, lifted from Gustav Metzger, who outlined the original proposal in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition ‘Art into Society/Society into Art’ at the ICA ...”

“... to Part One of the book. He sees Tennyson’s career divided into a phase of post-Romantic self-making, followed by a phase of cultural engagement. In Part Two, as Tucker promises, historical context is allowed back, and the book becomes both more interesting and more persuasive: but it never fully recovers from this distinction. The idea that ...”