“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the Soviet Union should contain a clause allowing all nations in the union the right to national self-determination, i.e. the right to secede.The Bolsheviks agreed soon after taking power that Finland, Poland and Ukraine should be granted independence. They knew that Ukraine was different, that its peculiar national texture (immigrant Russian proletariat and ...”

“... he is up to every predicament he encounters; he has the mother wit, the equanimity and the self-confidence of the epic hero. He is rarely turned in on himself, hardly ever bored, homesick, hungry, cold. Everyone who writes about Michel the Giant comments on his charm; but it isn’t charm as veneer, as facilitating ooze or unguent, but charm that ...”

“... then, is traditional in design, but it is also very modern, old but sounding new, simple yet self-referring in that it is a story about stories of the type it is itself, or, more simply, a story about Story. What it has to say about Story amounts to a demand for narrative or imaginative freedom, for the rights and duties of artists, and, by extension, of ...”

“... as the ‘what to’ were acknowledged. In the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties the presentation of self through clothes, and thus the presentation of fashion, changed. The magazines used more photographs, and those drew on personal fantasies more often than on social ones. Where you were going no longer predicted what you would go in. Plotting the ...”

“... West, ‘winning friends from all over the world’, and the Middle Kingdom, after two thousand self-regarding years, unsteadily began to look for foreign friends. In 1978 even the Class War was abandoned, but by then Mao (two years dead) had created a moral wasteland. Loyalty and compassion, where they survived, shone by contrast like the pearls which were ...”

“... not uncommon with those of unusual beauty. Still, at this time, a painting of a sinful self seemed to hang persistently on the wall of John Gray’s mind. Had he turned it over, he would have found another picture, of a portly, rosy-cheeked, golf-playing priest, with an impressive look of authority: the Father Gray (later Canon Gray) of ...”

“... The full career of Jim Henson reveals that the gulf between the traditions of fairy tale and the self-inventing styles of television culture generally thought to have supplanted them is not as wide as the disparity between the two frogs would suggest. For a start, one played the other in a film called The Frog Prince (1971). Inextricably linked with ...”

“... on progress, paralysing creative energy. It is invested with determinative force. It undermines self-confidence – for George Gilbert Scott it doomed architects to ‘capricious eclecticism’. It is the hump on the back of the cripple rather than the pack carried by the pilgrim. From wanting the past, the argument proceeds to knowing the past, and since ...”

“... or ‘inconsistency’ of his is a clue that the novel is one of those cute self-consuming artefacts. But this is unlikely. Homer sometimes nods. Wilson’s nods and becks and wreathed smiles are sometimes harder to take unseriously. In a sentence which is less exactly put than is his way, he has Severus Egg attend to ‘the stamp of his ...”

“... they are all decent men and women,” I thought, as I paid my bill at the garage; and then with self-pity added, ‘Who knows if it is any worse here than everywhere else?” ’ There are some good stories in Visitors Book. I was already familiar with Robert Bernen’s ‘Tales From the Bluestacks’, his evocations of a life spent among the sheep-farmers ...”

“... little spectacle, which has its relevance to that report and its aftermath. In an early moment of self-doubt, Marlowe’s Faustus declares: The God thou serv’st is thine own appetite, Wherein is fix’d the love of Beelzebub. However, he quickly smothers such realities with voluptuous determination: To him I’ll build an altar and a church And offer ...”

“... century’. I did not laugh at him then and do not now. Nevertheless I think he showed a lack of self-knowledge. He has proved himself to be a man of exceptional gifts, but his mind has displayed a religious rather than a scientific ...”