“... 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 ...”

“... is, accordingly, already a homeland for Palestinian Arabs: it is Jordan. When those Arabs ask for self-determination they are absurdly asking for something they already have; their claim was settled in 1922, and they have no right to Judea and Samaria (what they call the West Bank) or indeed to Gaza. In 1948 Abdullah actually wanted to call the new Arab state ...”

“... disgust is tracking me, like an impossible choice between that naval bullishness and a harmless self-esteem pricking in these pastures. You know that story – or poem is it? – about the fighter crashing near a spinster village? It tells you straight how that orchid privacy – the fine asparagus mind of some high civil servant – must turn in the end to ...”

“... brother: ‘a look of bruised innocence, of anxious love’. Later she writes of ‘the sullen, self-inflicted pain of blame’ shared by her and her siblings – the legacy, we are to suppose, of their Catholicism, of a father sentimentally committed to melancholy and of a mother who was unhappy because she could not pursue a middle-class way of life in ...”

“... you see Buckingham!’ Re-read Chapter 47 of Great Expectations. Pip, like many a hero of more self-consciously paranoid novels, has a feeling that he is being followed but has so far failed to catch a glimpse of his pursuer. He visits a Thamesside theatre where his friend Mr Wopsle, an earnest but unsuccessful actor, is appearing in a mixed ...”

“... wine: Cameriere, Vesuvio bianco per le signori! Signori? Quali? Dove? You OK? Sit there, talk to self all bloody day. But Tischbein had torn his sketch out of his book me, half finished with a haunted look. Behind me smudged with spilled Vesuvial wine a cloud from the crater shaped like Pliny’s pine. I picked it up but in one blinding flash it erupted into ...”

“... numerous, who, as tourists and students, support the city’s main business: being its beautiful self. We also bring problems. The points made by the speakers at the conference are as simple as the problems are intractable. They are not unique to this city but this city, being the most perfect, most famous, most desirable, most ancient magnet of its ...”

“... and industry. That chaos is now more often acknowledged than challenged by architects. The self-generated complexity of cities strains the infrastructure of roads, pipes and cables, stretches the language of building regulation and planning law, and throws up petition-signing protest groups at the drop of a computer-generated perspective. It is a ...”

“... it is because of this oscillation in attention between the minuscule and the vast, the self-evident and the ungraspably complex. There are secrets to discover. You can pick your way through the fridge mountain to get to the shop; in the office there is a monitor showing CCTV footage from the antechamber in the hotel. Elsewhere, in the recess behind ...”

“... both his personal myth and the basis of his early reputation. The mood often looks like sorrow, or self-incomprehension, or a stunted, irritated curiosity. But it is always submerged, working through denial. The face is still, the gestures calm, everything moves slowly, maybe he will fall asleep in mid-scene. But the sense of real danger is constant, and this ...”

“... in their New York lofts, surrounded by big, painterly abstract pictures suggest lives in which self-reference has become burdensome. As time passed both Guston and Rothko started to paint darker pictures. In photographs of Monet at work on the Nymphéas in his vast studio at Giverny the nearby reality which is the source of what he is painting is ...”

“... forms of behaviour are possible without it or outside it: what chances of decency, justice and self-respect; what varieties of licence, too. The simultaneous release of a DVD version of Delmer Daves’s classic 3.10 to Yuma (1957) and James Mangold’s remake of the same film – there is even a trailer for the new movie among the special features of the ...”

“... as clichés usually are. ‘I used to be with it,’ Grampa says in one episode with remarkable self-awareness, ‘but then they changed what “it” was.’ Cartoons are funny not, generally, because they exaggerate but because they are so lucid and so clearly defined, because they streamline physical features and have people say what we ordinarily only ...”

“... headless dog with phallus. This figure, Nature Study, is identified by Bourgeois as ‘a self-portrait, an animal metamorphosis of the artist’. This identification is typical. Mother and father, husband and children, childhood and betrayal are the source of the feelings the work builds on. In 1996 she stitched a handkerchief with the words ‘I ...”

“... reducing the action to minimal but memorable formulae, often concealing faces, as when the self-loathing of Judas is concentrated into a hunched back and a clenched fist, or when the Magi prostrate themselves like subject rulers in an Assyrian relief, or when Mary Magdalene is made to seem part of the rock on which the cross is raised. Delacroix was ...”