“... when the bay here was deserted. Had she tailed him in order to make one last bootless act of self-abasement manifest itself in Stone? He entered the ferry, no more than a full-size rowing boat, and waved goodbye to Miss Kate. She waved goodbye perhaps affectionately. Startled, doltish-looking Jane reappeared with ice-creams from the store. She noted ...”

“... Miss Hughes makes you momentarily wonder if she knows whom she is dealing with. Montale’s self-imposed task was to divest Italian poetry of cheaply poeticised effects, not to increase their number. Examples, alas, could be multiplied. Nevertheless Miss Hughes is right to see that Xenia is a good way for the English-speaking reader to begin acquiring ...”

“... especially since – as Grosskurth herself deftly uses them to show – Libussa was a dominant and self-dramatising person whose own accounts of people and events were often highly coloured. One particular episode is important. In 1908, Libussa informed Melanie that her sister Emilie had been conducting an adulterous affair as well as ruining her husband by ...”

“... might be brought against the ideas he intended to put forward. Perhaps, not so much a mark of self-assurance, it was merely a mannerism to confound his enemies, but it made an impression on me because my consciousness found such a tactic congenial. Otherwise, why remember an incident from a film of so long ago, when scores more are totally ...”

“... birth to Modernism it powerfully mobilised elements of a prewar cultural crisis and gave it new, self-conscious definition predicated on rupture. Against this orthodoxy several scholars – the art historians Kenneth Silver and Romi Golan, for example – have recently argued that, on the contrary, French art in the Twenties and Thirties was far more ...”

“... a great deal of trouble getting paid for his commission. Both groom and boy look quite stern and self-possessed, and though both are the owner’s servants, they seem anything but servile and are so indifferent to our regard as to appear almost arrogant. The reason may be that they have a skill which we do not share. They know about horses and this horse in ...”

“... can accomplish with no more than normal difficulty. The result for dyslexics is often low self-esteem and poor achievement. There are, however, compensations. Dyslexia does not affect intelligence or verbal skill, and in finding their own ways of reading and writing they (or perhaps I should say, we) often develop novel viewpoints and new approaches ...”

“... in trade unions for four years. In 2012 Moyer-Lee helped found the IWGB in order, as its sometimes self-dramatising, revolutionary red website puts it, to organise ‘the unorganised, the abandoned and the betrayed’. In June, when I first visited the offices, Moyer-Lee told me it already had six hundred members. ‘The vast majority are cleaners, bicycle ...”

“... cannot be got too black,’ he jotted in his sketchbook in a characteristic spirit of self-exhortation.) The picture is finished off with a varnish that has aged into a rich yellowy-brown: the total effect is sometimes said to resemble an etching, which is true enough, though it resembles something else even more, as Colin Harrison says in his ...”

“... people over another.’ A federation, an association of independent nations or a single state with self-governing minority regions? He never finally decided.His lifelong rival and adversary Roman Dmowski stood for ‘modern, scientific’ nationalism: the exclusive version based on race, force and mass unity that developed in the 19th century. Deeply ...”

“... Rév is the guardian of great stores of the past century’s lies and half-truths, deceptions and self-deceptions, representations and re-representations of mass horror and private mendacity, at all levels from the highest councils of state to the lowliest policeman. With sober, biting but never ingenuous hopefulness, he wrings its truths from the dross of ...”

“... original in my ideas, I must live up to expectations.’ Rosa also sent Ricciardi a philosophic self-portrait – the poseur in cavalier ringlets contemplating a skull, as if Russell Brand were to land the role of Hamlet. But composure was not Rosa’s métier. He took fright when the Chigi, butts of his satire, took over the papacy in 1655, sent his ...”

“... modernity are closely linked. Could we imagine something like Birkin’s words, minus the nasty self-righteousness, spoken gently – spoken out of love? For Spurling is right: love is at stake here. And of course the words in question (transposed into an ironic, puzzled, even admiring register) are addressed by Matisse not just to Amélie but to himself ...”

“... i.e. the writer he is hopefully pursuing.’ Pritchett was thinking here of his much younger self, who set off for Paris with a patchy, truncated education and a series of unsatisfying jobs behind him and an intense, but still vague and wholly unrealised, aspiration to become ‘a writer’ in front of him. ‘When, at 20, I got out of the train in the ...”

“... preferred and widely recognised style was henceforth officially to be the family’s style, his self-presentations theirs. In response to his nephew’s complaints about these practices, he at one point excuses his meddling by claiming that it was a compassionate response to a plea he had imagined coming from the dead, his brother calling out: ‘Oh, but ...”