“... He has changed the name of the former French colony, previously known as Upper Volta. He favours self-reliance over foreign aid. His revolution, he often says, requires discipline and commitment. It is backed by the overwhelming majority: all being well, they will become the architects of their own happiness. ‘Dare to invent the future,’ he ...”

“... I just submitted my opening paragraph for analysis. It gets low scores for ‘self-references’, ‘social words’ and ‘positive emotions’, and high scores for ‘negative emotions’, ‘overall cognitive words’, articles and ‘big words’. Which seems quite accurate, and perversely gratifying (though ‘big words’ aren’t ...”

“... narratives. It’s hard to know whether this represents an increase in PR sophistication and self-awareness, or a decrease in the general level of discourse. It’s at the level of narrative that the UK’s economic figures for the last quarter of 2010 are likely to prove most consequential. According to the Office for National Statistics, the economy ...”

“... then the fearful and subservient Arab minority that amounted to some 200,000 has recovered its self-esteem. A second and third generation has grown up, and today the Arab population is 1.5 million. But the attitude towards it of the Jewish right has not changed for the better. On the contrary. In the bakery that is the Knesset (the Hebrew word for ...”

“... lives, which are becoming miserable to a degree unseen in Europe for decades. Such predictions are self-fulfilling, causing panic and thus bringing about the very eventualities they warn against. If Syriza wins, the European establishment will hope that we learn the hard way what happens when an attempt is made to interrupt the vicious cycle of mutual ...”

“... early moment he is still hanging on to the old idea of the gentleman’s gentleman for the sake of self-deception. But this orderly dream is threatened almost immediately: Bogarde introduces his sister, Sarah Miles, as a possible housemaid, and it seems as if the two are planning some sort of robbery. They are, but not of worldly goods. Miles seduces ...”

“... nosy, curious, she was a collector of sleeping strangers. Also on display is her series of self-portraits taken inside aeroplane lavatories, done ‘in the Flemish style’. From a distance, she indeed looks like a figure in a Flemish painting wearing headdress and ruff; up close, the headdress reveals itself to be a white vest draped over a curved ...”

“... a ‘bureaucratic nightmare’: doctor’s forms are sent but never received; a wife becomes self-employed and benefits are stopped for the duration of the investigation into her earnings; a patient is discharged from hospital, and because his benefits were stopped while he was ill, he now has nothing. Some people have to be coaxed in; they tell the ...”

“... clear from the first room that Spencer is going to emerge as the star student. In a series of self-portraits done on Professor Tonks’s orders, Spencer’s – in red chalk on paper, with rugged cross-hatchings and a steady gaze – is the one that stands out. His Nativity (1912) hangs in the same room, painted when he was 21 for the Slade’s summer ...”

“... like the ‘dignified severity’ of Ozu’s films. He was probably thinking of their austere, self-denying style; but the contents of the films are severely limited too. The characters are not tiresome, though, because the internal spaces of their limited worlds are so vast, and so unforgettably delineated. Consider a famous scene from Early Summer ...”

“... it in The Language of Autobiography, that occurs when the autobiographer sees their written self suddenly cohere. The place condenses into the image; nothing more can be seen now. Vilhelm Hammershøi’s ‘Montague Street in London’ (1906). My view of the British Museum is unlikely to change, though had Colin St John Wilson’s designs for a ...”

“... of Western governments to rely on diaspora personalities to endorse their own wishful thinking and self-regarding readings of reality in the region, and as a source of personnel to be parachuted into power – or at least office – in each and every regime change effected by Western military muscle. In an advertisement broadcast recently in Pakistan, where ...”

“... silvery-tongued back-ups to whatever life-muddle he happened to be engaged with’. Yet Ford’s self-exculpatory fantasies animate the sequence in a wonderfully mad way. ‘I stand for monogamy and chastity,’ Christopher Tietjens says, setting himself against the times as well as his devil-wife, Sylvia. The books are suffused with a seriously meant – if ...”

“... to metaphors in capital letters (A PROBLEM IS A BODY OF WATER, THE BODY IS A CONTAINER FOR THE SELF, THEORIES ARE CLOTH, THE CHANGEABILITY OF A BELIEF IS THE RESILIENCE OF THE OBJECT) is a legacy of the work of George Lakoff, the originator and still the high priest of metaphor studies, who emerged from MIT in the 1960s as a student and antagonist of Noam ...”

“... a man who died, and in him died The large-eyed boy, then the teen peacock In the unremarked placid self-devouring That makes up being alive. But all at once Those natural overlaps got cut, then shuffled Tight in a block, their layers patted square. v It’s late. And it always will be late. Your small monument’s atop its hillock Set with pennants that ...”