“... with the Pole. Living things stretch their being across immense spaces, and huge energies of the self peter out in a friendly handshake with the cosmos: so the Snow-Shoe Hare meets the Moon and the White Bear embraces all the North. In Logue’s Homer, the touch of whimsy springs from an inability to take the heroic seriously, even as a thing to attack. A ...”

“... America. Repudiating the ‘reformist’ policies of the continent’s Communist Parties, this self-proclaimed Leninist rejected, not only the urban proletariat, but also the peasantry, as the motive force of the revolution. For, far from living among the peasants ‘like fish in water’ (Mao), the revolutionary base ought to remain for ever on the ...”

“... family life could mesh with a fear that creation itself was in such jeopardy that any attempt at self-expression – whether in art, politics or religion – was irrelevant and even fatuous. You could imagine this dilemma inspiring a perverse comedy (think of Billy Wilder or Paul Thomas Anderson running it, let alone Preston Sturges) in which a respected ...”

“... at home there, or learned more than a few words of Welsh. But he seized on ‘being Welsh’ as a self-masking identity, intended to make him different, even mysterious, to his contemporaries. This strategy didn’t always convince. He certainly seemed English enough to his friends as he grew up and calmed down, emerging as a ...”

“... to focus on an activity so closely that they lose awareness of time, external surroundings and self-consciousness. Such experiences become autotelic, as the boundaries between self and activity fade.’ When, win or lose, Charlie and I reunite after a tournament game, he has the dazed look of a scuba diver resurfacing ...”

“... an interview with a successful entrepreneur with a public-school education and a charmingly self-deprecating manner who has built a niche business purveying high-end furniture, posh chocolate or some other reassuringly expensive indicator of taste.The authors assume that this wealth elite has ‘real power’ because it combines ‘positional power and ...”

“... to Strozzi, which are full of assurances that the plan is proceeding swimmingly, interspersed with self-serving excuses for why the painting is not yet in his possession. At one point he claims to have leaped from the roof of the Palazzo della Signoria, landing unhurt in a conveniently parked hay cart below, as if he were Errol Flynn or Buster Keaton. Never ...”

“... of vision’. They remind us we’re watching a ‘mediated form of seeing’.The self-referentiality of A Matter of Life and Death anticipates The Red Shoes, with its reflection on the process (and the psychological cost) of making art and cinema. Like its predecessor, the film has two contrasting modes of representation. A fantasy ballet ...”

“... Goldin reveres Visconti, Antonioni, Cassavetes, Jack Smith. Her images – I’m thinking of a self-portrait at a window, in which she has a curl at the nape of her neck and scratches on her exposed back – form part of an autobiographical narrative, one that reveals in order to keep battling against denial and revisionism. They push back against the ...”

“... class on physics; elementary particles are infinitesimal, but the universe is infinite; Kana is a self-contained hamlet in forested Thuringia, but it is subject to the encroachment of violent outside forces. Herr Köhler runs a rooftop weather station, from which he gathers meteorological data on behalf of the townspeople and analyses ‘data from the ...”

“... welcome the Holy Alliance as ‘the most liberal of all ideas’? Two aspects of Alexander’s self-presentation in the years leading up to the treaty secured its credibility as an instrument of progressive reform. The first was his successful mobilisation of one of the most enduring political scripts of the Enlightenment: the virtuous monarch as ‘friend ...”

“... more or less victorious. The diaries he left behind are melancholy, desultory and remorselessly self-recriminating, consisting in large part of resolutions, inevitably broken, to rise early, study hard and control himself. Yet Johnson was also a convivial, energetic, witty man, the cure for whose weakness (as he said himself) was company. The drive to ...”

“... proposes to address, and often a cover for more pernicious motives. Celebrities are particularly self-serving in this regard. In his essay ‘The Birth of White Saviour Imagery’, Wainaina’s ‘how to’ becomes a caustic ‘how not to’: ‘You should avoid picking up random children you do not know for a photo that you then publish online … no matter ...”

“... of the National Guard then declared Paris a revolutionary commune, a democratic, equal and self-managing society. The Commune lasted just 72 days until the army, which was under the control of the Versailles government, fought through the defences. It ended in the ‘semaine sanglante’, with the soldiers massacring more than ten thousand Communards ...”

“... briefly?‘William and the Nasties’ is a clumsy attempt to satirise the rise of Nazism. Greedy self-interest is what motivates the Outlaws, together with the belief that the law will be on their side. According to William, ‘It’s not stealin’ when you’re nasties. It’s by lor if you’re nasties.’ Even I could see that this wouldn’t ...”