“... had perhaps become rotted by peace. Now, proclaimed the poets, was the chance for a proud and self-confident people to show themselves worthy of their ancestors, to meet any test, to bear any burden, to make any sacrifice to preserve their honour. England had been at peace for a hundred years; too long, perhaps, for its own good. Through war, her ...”

“... something like conscience. The charm turns out to be a stalking-horse, a method of persuasion, the self-conscious defensive/protective mechanism characteristic of all exploited groups, a composite of Jewish charm, Black charm, Irish charm, Hispanic charm, female charm. It is part of the apparatus of the tragic sense of life. Technically, Grace Paley’s work ...”

“... that can’t be touched’) were not so well drawn, the slide from confusion and depression into self-starvation would be inexplicable. As it is, the stratagems Willa uses to avoid eating, and to avoid confronting the fact that she is starving herself to death, come to seem psychologically credible: you begin to see why not eating might seem the only thing ...”

“... kind. Jack is the standard-model wild novelist, Sarah is determined to ‘keep her painting self intact’, and gets help from a German refugee art teacher who says Ach and Ja. Rows, love affairs, success for both follow. Sarah sells pictures, Jack becomes New Zealand’s senior novelist, wins a Commonwealth Prize for literature, drops dead at 52. As ...”

“... and a concern for the cultivation of feelings as it was by any commitment to the premises of self-interest and rational calculation ... This is a widely ramifying theme, discussion of which must inevitably be open-ended and somewhat untidy ... I am suggesting that the ideal of character ... enjoyed a prominence in the political thought of the Victorian ...”

“... he produced 21 paintings in eight months for the monastery of San Pablo el Real. He was largely self-taught but quickly absorbed the naturalism and light effects of Velázquez, who had established his reputation in Seville a few years earlier, as well as the drama of Juan Martínez Montañés’s candlelit polychrome sculptures. Zurbarán added a ...”

“... in the North of England by the Conservatives. Denunciations of Labour’s metropolitan self-satisfaction were interrupted occasionally by vague speculation as to whether Scotland’s recovery from the pandemic might be ruined by the ‘distraction’ of a vote on independence. English voters don’t get much Scottish news, but Scottish voters get ...”

“... Fragonard in his bones, alongside Renoir, Redon, Miró, Dufy. Again, at the level of opinion and self-reflection Dubuffet was undoubtedly sincere in his wish to escape from that inheritance – he spent much of his career pouring scorn on the paintings he saw on the Rive Gauche – but he was no kind of fool: he knew full well that every movement of his ...”

“... but it has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. A rat will do, we don’t need a Dostoevskyan self-hating rat. So what has Douglas done? He has manipulated Turner not for her sake but for the sake of his film; stolen a script and idea from Sullivan the director (‘Without me it would have stayed an idea’); and arranged for Powell’s dippy wife (very ...”

“... old flame for the same reason he can’t commit to his marriage – or anything else but his own self-absorption. The eternal sameness of everyone else is not a fact of this film’s life but a projection of Stone’s defence against experience; of his unacknowledged clinging to a lonely male stereotype. Lisa is an exception, an Anomalisa as Stone puts ...”

“... that it will ‘decompose’ in a minute. For many years it was spoken on a tape that would ‘self-destruct’; now it is on some unspecified ‘device’. In all cases, though, it erases its information in a puff of smoke, the perfect instance of a deniable project, existing, at least until the story gets going, only in a small selection of minds. Or ...”

“... him burning to death.’ The trouble is that this tough talk about survival and the supremacy of self-interest is at odds with the selflessness of the pilots and all the sailors of the Little Ships, and specifically of the boy who makes it into the local newspaper. He wasn’t supposed to be on the boat sailing from Weymouth, but he wanted to be part of the ...”

“... and casting them off just as quickly. This finds comic expression in Duchamp’s photographic self-portraits as Rrose Sélavy (‘Eros, c’est la vie’), his female alter ego, and in Multiple Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (1917), in which the pensive pipe-smoking artist is multiplied, using mirrors, into five clones around a table. A similar air of ...”