“... on such slim evidence. At one point Gotlieb contrasts Meissonier’s supposed flight from ‘the self-referentiality that defines the history of Western painting’ to Manet’s attempt to ‘thematise’ modern art’s relationship to tradition ‘in his major canvasses of the 1860s’. It’s a promising comparison, but Gotlieb’s way of proposing it ...”

“... or at any rate made it plausible to claim – that independent-minded peasants and tradesmen, self-enriching and assertive, would shortly undermine all the Bolsheviks stood for. Plans were laid against the impending counter-revolution: hideous, impossible goals were set. Within five years, agriculture was to be collectivised and a massive industrial base ...”

“... that their neighbours might be doing so.’ Like many others, I kept hoping that mutual self-interest would prevail, forgetting that this wasn’t a situation in which anything so rational could be expected. ‘We don’t wish to live with them any more. We have to separate once and for all,’ one read and heard people say in Serbia, but nobody I ...”

“... In paying for the favours of Heinrich, Joachim has ‘subsidised the mirror image of his darkest self’ – his ‘wicked, sensual, animal existence’. Perhaps he drove Heinrich into a position where he had no choice but to ‘sink down into the anonymous mass of his fellow evil-doers – the storm-troopers’. The problem is compounded by Joachim’s own ...”

“... these characters are victimised and essentially innocent, and it is Ahab, mutilated, vengeful and self-enslaved, who is the book’s true monster. Dickens also employs the myth in its original secular form, as a contest between the classes in a post-revolutionary, post-industrial world. ‘As the poetic justice of Dickens’s plots so often implies, monsters ...”

“... of the psychoanalytic theory built around it, is itself a form of family romance, a potentially self-aggrandising allusion to the two ancient but unmythological people who happen to be one’s parents. As Roith writes, referring to the precursor of her own book, Marine Robert’s From Oedipus to Moses, ‘the primordial murdered father in Freud’s Oedipean ...”

“... in the Thirties. The novel is dominated by two characters: Sasha Pankratov, the hero, an obvious self-portrait of the author, and Stalin. Thrown out of the institute in which he is studying for his part in composing a seditious number of a wall newspaper – it contains not a single mention of Comrade Stalin – Pankratov is then suspected of involvement in ...”

“... will render the high-level account superfluous, vacuous, or even down-rightly false, is to court self-refutation because, of course, the argument is itself a high-level statement. Likewise, to believe that the mind can be properly understood only at the neuronal level is like believing that the study of coins will reveal the truth about economics. Let us ...”

“... hear of pre-historic man.’ Such a passage obviously could not be written today. We are far too self-conscious and guilty about our ethnocentrism ever to admit to such a reaction even if we had it. The word ‘savage’ alone would be beyond the pale, more embarrassing than any four-letter word. Under the severe tutelage of anthropologists and in the long ...”

“... often gains its force from the mixture of motives on the part of the traveller, the blend of self-extinction and self-discovery which is brought on by immersion in alien surroundings. Like the people in his books, the people whose stories he has travelled to tell, Chatwin is a wanderer and an obsessive: it’s this ...”

“... Libyan adventure of 1912, an essay which combines patriotic fervour with a deep intelligence and self-questioning. Like so many others he died and disappeared, his work now virtually unknown except to a few fellow bibliophiles: had he lived, he would probably have disappeared in any case into middle-aged obscurity, the state of resignation which, as he found ...”

“... on whom he experimented for meagre payments). In fact, the myth of Hunter’s self-inoculation was scotched by George Quist in a 1979 paper. The story, designed to fit the image of the inhuman experimentalist, was fabricated by a pupil of Hunter’s, Jesse Foot, who had become a disgruntled rival. One of Hunter’s biographers wants to ...”

“... mysterious sequences leading to the heart of ‘the human predicament’, with unattainable love, self-consuming desire, the intertwining of past, present and future. The protagonists never know what has actually happened to them. Nor, frequently, do Duras’s viewers or readers. When she got control of a camera herself, her films became ...”

“... make up All around Atlantis has an ‘I’, and this may signal a further shift in Eisenberg’s self-denying aesthetic, her predilection for the other view that leaves more room for the voice of the text. In her two earlier collections, Transactions in a Foreign Currency, 12 years ago and Under the 82nd Airborne in 1992, narrators were in any case regularly ...”

“... stranger are deemed excessive: ‘of all the parts of a man that can hurt, a penis is the least’ Self-indulgence and inconsistency characterised The Female Eunuch as well, but they were rendered unimportant by the book’s overall zest. In 1970, Greer wrote as an optimist in tune with her time, and shaping it. This is a less buoyant, less coherent volume by ...”