“... Pei-Ming, a sadistic burst of fleshy pinks and reds from Yang Shaobin, and a sinister, denatured self-portrait (see left) by Yue Minjun, the most fashionable of them all. ‘It would be worth taking a few hits on that stuff,’ I heard a dealer mutter to his assistant, ‘just to break into the Chinese market.’ At Christie’s in St James’s for the ...”

“... they drink. She is four years old, and that is the only unconvincing thing about her: in her calm self-sufficiency she seems more like a sophisticated eight or nine-year-old, perfectly at ease in grown-up company, and with no problems about getting herself dressed or going to the lavatory. But apart from that implausibility, she is a delightfully achieved and ...”

“... that may be because he is so very keen to put across his message, that what we all need is self-knowledge, humility and forgiveness. The first quality is preached by a wise psychiatrist (they are quite rare in fiction), and the other two by a Catholic priest, Father Kostka; he has no part in the story, but pops up occasionally as a patient in ...”

“... our Army and press used to call our ‘Security Zone’ (the foreign media called it ‘Israel’s self-proclaimed security zone’); and then, two years ago, out of that same Security Zone. The generals who were beaten then are running the current war. They have lived that defeat every day. And now they can teach them – that is, the Arabs – their ...”

“... are known as neighbours’; the unbearably pompous and long-winded Lord Chancellor Brougham; the self-pitying Lord Althorp; and Lord Durham, who, Pearce guesses, had ‘read his Shelley’, though in 1832 pretty well no one, let alone a Whig earl, had read Shelley. Pearce has something nice to say about most of the Tories, too, notably the nauseating and ...”

“... led voters to overlook the kinds of insult to the citizens’ intelligence which the inexplicably self-defeating management of the terrorist attack brought back to mind: might they not have receded within a few days? As people grope to make sense of the reasons, local and international, political and emotional, which have landed them in a not altogether ...”

“... inequity leaves open the possibility of chaos, and creates endless opportunities for individual self-aggrandisement. But it seems to me that the risks were worth taking, now that we’ve seen the dismal results of our 20-year-long experiments with centralised targets, management echelons and paper-based accountability. A couple of years ago I spent several ...”

“... a black-and-white film of an execution, followed by a repeated shot of an engraving, a Rembrandt self-portrait, black eyes staring, face frozen. This man really does seem to have seen what we have just seen. I’m naming names because that seems to be the quickest way of conveying something of the effect of what’s on the screen, but gesture is also ...”

“... Rights, which has been years in the making as a result of their unwillingness to fund it. A self-interested and outdated view of sovereignty is still the best defence for African presidents, veiling their own accountability and overriding the fundamental rights of their citizens. 2 ...”

“... they seem fully equipped to face … what? This is the question posed and deflected by the bland self-satisfaction all three faces express. Wood’s trio are a set of strangely inbred organisms, creatures only able to subsist in dim isolation, far from the light. Wood made no bones about the fact that in painting this picture, he aimed to distil a social ...”

“... had our differences,’ the android says in his formal, English manner – but perhaps need and self-interest will start a beautiful friendship. The new work takes its title, and its spaceship’s name, not from Conrad or Greek myth but from Abraham: they are called Covenant. (It’s not clear that this title has to do with anything other than the agreement ...”

“... The nostalgia that colours the writing is for something that was never fully experienced and a self that is never constituted: ‘The thing about being very young, as you are, is the permeability/Of one person to another.’ This feeds the desire to be recognised and to connect which roars out of the page in moments of strikingly simple language: ‘He has ...”

“... historic suffering. There are moments in his early work when his shoulders seem to sag under the self-imposed strain. Take, for example, the title poem of Dancing in Odessa: ‘My grandfathers fought/the German tanks on tractors, I kept a suitcase full/of Brodsky’s poems.’ Are the two acts moral equivalents, or is keeping the suitcase a miniaturised ...”

“... they can gallop at 40 mph on feet the size of dinner plates, but it remains safer not to: they self-entangle. Their tongue, which is dark purplish-blue to protect it from the sun and more powerful than that of any other ungulate, is fifty centimetres long: they can scrape the mucus from deep inside their own nostrils with the tip. And they are the ...”

“... else happens, and then spring arrives. ‘In a typical poem,’ Ruefle writes of her work in ‘Self-Criticism’ (2016), ‘a woman is sitting alone doing absolutely nothing. She notices a fly crawling across the table and strikes up a conversation with him. Something terribly dramatic happens, and the poem ends.’ This is fairly accurate, except that ...”