“... the evocation of impossibility. Much else besides, no doubt. At times Marías’s images take on a self-consciously Proustian flavour, the sense of a homage to the master of the exfoliating, multiple-choice analogy. Perhaps she was crying too because she felt the kind of envy or sense of exile that afflicts children when they are separated from their ...”

“... this is horribly complete. To measure the astonishing degree to which the ethos of Yugoslavia’s self-liberation could overcome hatred and revenge one needs perhaps to have seen the depths out of which it had to climb. That it did so Woodward, no kind of sentimentalist, is able to confirm. Why then this ferocious disintegration? Why its appalling speed and ...”

“... narratives as they reminisce. They engage a million man-hours of refugee-time in introspection and self-analysis, and consequently feel more depressed at the end of the day than they were at dawn. They are suicidal. A great many of them are religiously reflective, pondering on the curse that has paid them and their country a visitation. Only much later, in the ...”

“... is early slang for “homosexual”, and “man of all trades”, in a gay context, self-explanatory.’ (She does not cite the delightful, if apocryphal, story of the woman who had a crush on the handsome and multi-talented Bernstein and replied, on being told that he was gay: ‘Is there nothing that that man can’t do?’) She goes on to ...”

“... resigning in furious opposition to the very principle of popular consultation by referendum. This self-conscious wish to stand apart from the hoi polloi linked up with the sociology of meritocratic ascent. ‘Even when I disagreed with them,’ one SDP MP said to the authors, ‘I used to think of the people at Labour Party Conferences as my people. Then, a ...”

“... Security and Armed Forces and can govern by decree. To do so, however, the head of state must be a self-confident and energetic figure. Yeltsin is exhausted, has had two heart attacks of unknown severity and is prone to disabling depression. He is famously pneumatic, but his five years of office have seen a steady decline in his powers. Energy and ...”

“... of war; the lolloping punctuation; the careful suggestion of wide reading and the faint twinkle of self-conscious word-play. In 1930 Auden was a 23-year-old Oxford graduate, recently returned from a year in Berlin, who had finally had his first collection of poems accepted by Faber. He was a young man beginning to make his mark on the world; he was discovering ...”

“... automobile that takes us where we wish to go’ – which will be cheap because they are self-reproducing. Probably, ‘the self-reproducing machine will be partly made of genes and enzymes.’ During the next thousand years ‘we must expect’ that ‘collective memory and collective consciousness’ made ...”

“... the fourth syllable. Victorian hymn music came under attack early in this century, censured for self-indulgence, cloying chromaticism and ‘vulgar lusciousness’. These charges are accepted by Bradley a little too readily. Jolly though it is to hear the High Victorians accused of decadence, we may wonder how far the accusation is just; if these composers ...”

“... written after the move to revolutionary Cuba, is a summary of his life so far, in a self-portrait that’s not the work of a weak man: And after every episode – that’s what you had to call them – of travelling, loving, hating, working, talking, he was left inert, indestructible in a way, as though whole and untouched, not consumed, not ...”

“... If, as Auden wrote, poetry makes nothing happen, then the poetry anthology has no such self-effacing qualms. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion knew this, as did the predecessor they were tussling with, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (which was tussling with its predecessor, Robert Conquest’s New Lines). ‘This anthology,’ they wrote in their ...”

“... might have been a flattering likeness of Mrs Riddle into a masterpiece. Like Poussin’s great self-portrait in the Louvre, it is a painting about art and the making of art. Like Poussin, Cassatt places her sitter’s head in a series of framings which both hold it in place and call attention to the relation between the rectangles within the painting (one ...”

“... does get a little chilly in the long run, and Ulrich, like his creator, has a strange capacity for self-satisfaction alongside his gift for self-criticism. But the writing never stops being funny and illuminating, and we’d be lost if we had to approve of writers in order to keep reading them. Ulrich is a fully developed ...”

“... does occur more often than ‘judgment’ and ‘Hell’? Death is its ineluctable self. Yet it stands for much more besides, especially in the writings of St Paul. Marius should count the number of times that ‘death’ is mentioned in the Epistle to the Romans, and should consider its symbolic, religious meaning. Death meant sin. It was ...”

“... the audience sees: a remarkable figure, an artist reaching a popular audience with an art as self-conscious and self-referential as any élite audience could wish. Invoking a triad proposed by Jameson, Zizek sees Hitchcock as an exponent of realism (in his British films of the Thirties), of Modernism (in his American ...”