“... houses. When corruption hits the rich the poor soon join in. I despise those women who talk self-control while they’re burning hot on the inside. Aphrodite! how can such a wife look into her husband’s face without fear? What if the darkness, her accomplice – what if the very rooms of her house began to speak? For me now, ladies, death is 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 ...”

“... in Laurencin’s work, and femininity its primary theme. In Woman with a Fan (1912), a probable self-portrait, she rhymes the twisted coil of her braid with the unfolding pleats of a fan and the sloping curves of shoulder, neck and breast. Pablo Picasso and Jean Metzinger had both painted several pictures of women with fans in the preceding ...”

“... voice extra attention. She was said to prefer it, but it was set aside in favour of something more self-conscious.The album opens with the title track, about the Baader-Meinhof Group. The first thing you hear is a squiggle of synth. Reynolds brought in Steve Winwood – whose musical career stretches from the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic in the 1960s to the ...”

“... with him and a stroll with him, a letter from his wife (the slavishly devoted Mme Émilie Teste, self-professed ‘plaything of a muscular knowledge’, who reminds me of a story about Wallace Stevens, once asked by a rather forward interviewer what his wife was called, and saying in surprise ‘Mrs Stevens’), a letter to him from an unnamed friend, a ...”

“... appear to be a step that should be taken unilaterally and might be undertaken out of enlightened self-interest by the military. But one cannot rely on that. And there is always a risk that these weapons may come to be regarded as bargaining chips, not to be moved until some progress is made in the negotiations over intermediate-range nuclear weapons, where ...”

“... preceding slope of the curve. Disruptive counter-cultures? Endemic civil wars? Reritualisation? Self-defeating pursuit of material consumption in a perpetual potlatch? There is no way in which we can possibly know what will happen, and still less can we even guess how it will be conceptualised when it does. This last point, indeed, is perhaps the one most ...”

“... not ‘Hunter’, if Dische is making a Mitford point, as she seems to be, about ‘class self-consciousness’ – a neat term invented by Benedikt’s Jewish colleague Dr Graf. Another stylistic oddity is that all flower names are in German. Perhaps they are meant to evoke the lyrical side of the German character, whereas the gruff absence of ...”

“... his day as his predecessors were. And what he has to say about contemporary Purbeckiana is oddly self-referring in its idiom. ‘Tyneham,’ he suggests, ‘became emblematic of the wider cultural syndrome, endemic in post-war Britain, that leaves its victims unable to grasp the modern world except through allegorical fables of malign encroachment.’ ‘I ...”

“... language in attacking corruption, luxury and ostentation. ‘Well before the Great Reform Act, the self-made man had already donned a new image,’ Kuchta asserts. Men became even more serious and their clothing even simpler, winning admiration from such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who admired this English ‘studied plainness’ as a manifestation of innate ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... have made reassuring gestures. George Bush and Condoleezza Rice have backed Israel’s right to ‘self-defence’ and blamed Hizbullah’s very existence for the current violence. Meanwhile Tony Blair – in an ironic reversal of the Blair Doctrine, which calls for intervention for humanitarian reasons – has called for more UN peacekeepers to be deployed in ...”