“... is through peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals. In addition to being a vehicle for self-promotion, often at others’ expense, The Seven Daughters of Eve serves as a marketing device. The dust cover of the hardback edition proclaimed that Sykes ‘has always emphasised the importance of the individual in shaping our genetic world. The website ...”

“... or who has read Purity of Diction in English Verse (1952), will be familiar with this sort of self-regarding fury. ‘I should like to think,’ Davie ominously begins a sentence in Purity of Diction, ‘that this study might help some practising poet to a poetry of urbane and momentous statement.’ Like most practising poets, Enright did not take ...”

“... It appeared to many of us borderline holy that Johnson could write with such lack of swagger and self-pity about a guy making an absolute ruin of his life. The same was sometimes said of Carver, but Johnson made Carver seem lugubrious. Then came Drown, which to a certain degree emulated Carver’s pared-down prose but took greater risks with form and ...”

“... Pleasure implies dirtying your hands and mind, and being threatened; there is fear, disgust, self-loathing and moral failure. Pleasure was hard work; not everyone, perhaps not most people, could bear to find it.’ Jamal’s preferred position in relation to this fearful business is as an observer, in the background, watching. It’s as if he feels ...”

“... there was no need for a socialist tradition to combat the right or to advance the interests of a self-aware proletariat. Instead all shades of opinion across the political spectrum subscribed unselfconsciously to the American Way of Life, which Hartz labelled ‘mass Lockeanism’. Locke, he insisted, ‘dominates American political thought, as no thinker ...”

“... abstracted, inattentive, haughty-seeming; Carmel’s older brother, Richie, an alcoholic and self-confessed failure; their father, John, silent and invalided, devastated by the loss of his second wife, Rose; and Lucy herself, ‘known universally as trouble’. When Mia’s body is found on the estate the next day, her neck suspiciously bruised, Tom’s ...”

“... I was being paid to say what was there, not to critique it; but, where I could, I inserted a self-deprecating inflection, leaving my tongue in the great man’s cheek. These days, I usually get a couple of weeks with the manuscript before recording, to check pronunciations, especially pertinent with, for example, Brazilian Portuguese, which can be a ...”

“... Too often in history, it was argued, the vigilance and civic virtue required to sustain republican self-rule had dissipated, and the ensuing corruption, chaos and division had paved a path to dictatorship for a Caesar or a Cromwell. Republican government wasn’t thought compatible with territorial extent on the American scale. Small city-states had proved ...”

“... different stories and points of view. Here she accommodates herself, the author as sage. No longer self-effacing, she affects to be all-seeing. And what she sees is how little empathy and self-knowledge humans have.The bleakness is offset by acts of generosity and strokes of luck. Artie has the gift of precognition, and when ...”

“... of Wagner. And in a series of pieces composed in the first two decades of the 20th century he self-consciously progressed towards what is now referred to as atonality. Schoenberg disliked the term, proposing instead polytonality or pantonality, which allowed for multiple rather than unrecognisable tonal connections.He rarely abandoned tonality ...”

“... of infidels and Jews and determined to conquer the West, a civilisation gone soft, weakened by self-doubt, political correctness bordering on treason, and, worst of all, a ‘culture of denial’. Gilbert spells it out: In the 1930s, the danger of Nazism was there . . . but people thought, well, this is a German problem, it’s a limited problem ...”

“... of Rothko’s statements is now, and probably always was, an act of faith that requires a sort of self-hypnosis. ‘Red on Maroon’ (1959), section four of the Seagram mural. The series that dominates the exhibition, the Seagram murals, arose from a commission for paintings to line the walls of a private dining-room in the Four Seasons restaurant in ...”

“... it has taken over the slightly older Passmore Edwards Library next door. Passmore Edwards, a self-educated social reformer and newspaper proprietor, provided money for the gallery – he had funded other, similar buildings. He wanted his name on this one. Henrietta Barnett, the driving force behind the project, objected and what would, it seems, have ...”

“... runs until 5 April at the Val-de-Grâce military hospital in Paris. It is a cautious, self-regarding show about lives led in the Legion and famous legionnaires. As you’d expect, grizzled ex-Nazis flushing out the Viet Minh along the Red River Delta are downplayed. The Legion’s stars include the poet Blaise Cendrars, who joined in 1914, and the ...”