“... the proposed change in the French retirement age. She’s funny too, but a bit too brusque and self-contained, as we realise when she announces to herself that she is not to be pitied. Of course not. When after 25 years of marriage her husband leaves her for another woman, she asks him why he didn’t just get on with his double life and keep quiet about ...”

“... are also risks. Living with Covid means every sore throat or runny nose is a quandary. Should I self-isolate and take a test right away or leave it for a day to see how the symptoms develop? Research virologists working with deadly pathogens run through the same mental calculations as the rest of us – they will often decide to shrug off a mild fever and ...”

“... from one of Goya’s anti-clerical drawings asks to be compared with a photograph of Casals in self-imposed exile writing what might be a letter asking for funds (this was many years after the war) for ageing Spanish exiles.It was a war in which style could be matched to event. Picasso’s games with anatomy – at once dangerous and playful – had ...”

“... Bern until 1 December. Perhaps wherever one sees Soutine the experience is going to be violent, self-contradictory, disorientating. But the contrast between the immaculate physical setting – with its black or white gallery walls, some curved and some straight, small rooms, long passageways, snug little mezzanine at the end and introspective pebble beach ...”

“... 1848. The old order fell, not as the result of a great popular upheaval, but because it had lost self-confidence, was not prepared to defend itself, and crumbled at the first sign of urban insurrection. The exceptions of course were the Poles. There the Catholic Church had preserved across class barriers a stubborn and universal sense of national resistance ...”

“... Extravagance and self-indulgence were among the kinder accusations levelled at Orson Welles by industry chiefs. For the most part the charges were unjust. Not only was Welles possibly the most distinguished film artist to be abused and all but broken by the system, and by leading individuals within it (including politicians, newspaper magnates, journalists, gossip-columnists and even critics), he was possibly the least culpable ...”

“... only possible course of action was to hold press conferences with Western journalists: that was self-destructive and I think it was linked to the fact that they had right-wing and pro-capitalist positions. Young people simply stopped joining the dissidents and began to look for different solutions. We had discussion groups and studied left-wing Western ...”

“... to vote did not include women or slaves. Among the American founding fathers who proclaimed the self-evident truth that all men are born equal were several slave-owners. In this country until the 20th century the unsuitability of women to vote, sit on juries or join the professions was regarded – at least by men – as too obvious for argument. We ...”

“... casual bit of play with a stray loose end of the fabric, but before long the entire texture of the self is unravelled and comes apart. The whole process happens at an unsettling speed. Irony possesses an inherent tendency to gain momentum and not to stop until it has run its full course; from the small and apparently innocuous exposure of a small ...”

“... was under no illusion that the basic cause of the war was anything other than that of self-defence against Jesuitical Papists. Now it is true that, in retrospect, Baxter would say that the Civil War became a ‘War for Religion’ in 1643. But this does not mean (as Brian Manning seems to think) that he thought that it had been about ...”

“... nothing at all ‘Happened’ ... This absence of the explainable beyond the renewal of the self-containedness of the image     (One could go round and round This single and Sicilian less     Than happening) gives the sequence its beautiful and tough purity, as of those ‘clear-glassed windows/The clear day looking in’ which the poet ...”

“... of four famous politicians with a common vision of what needed doing, who had gathered a self-selected larger gang around them. One of the first ways in which the new members showed their gratitude to the man whose brainchild the Party had first been was to kick away the ladder by which he hoped to climb to power. First the convention, then the ...”

“... they see the world afresh with a gendered, if not Martian eye; questioners, dissenters and self-styled outcasts, they are among our most eloquent ‘inner émigrés’. Hence the enormous interest of Michèle Roberts’s contribution to the new Pandora anthology On Gender and Writing. In a volume remarkable for its intelligence and verve – one thinks ...”

“... of a search for alternatives and in the sense indicated by Romano, of sottogoverno, duplicity, self-interested manipulation and so on. The Italianate legend of Machiavellianism conflates the two things into one sinister image: ‘politics’ may accomplish miracles if sufficient virtu (cunning and will power) is put into it; or, if not a new world, then at ...”

“... psyche, from where we emerge feeling sympathy for the man’s plight and respect for his self-restraint. Setting the record straight is only a modest part of Carpenter’s project in this biography. His more ambitious aim is to relate Britten’s emotional and sexual life to his music. This is a tall order; it’s clear that Carpenter doesn’t ...”