“... of life on an Italian island to be discussed – and not infrequently duplicitous. Writing a self-confessed ‘fan letter’ to Britten about the premiere of Peter Grimes, he is also shooting off a note to the copyist Roy Douglas asking: ‘Did you see or hear “Grimy Peter”?’ Asperities about fellow composers are in plentiful supply. Tippett was ...”

“... that the plot confirms, while sensible figures within the text diagnose the ‘circles of self-reference’ and ‘echo chambers’ in which his mind wanders. Like the novel’s witchy madwoman, who is also a reader of occult signs, Lamb apparently possesses real powers of divination – powers that the novel never chooses to explain away. The ...”

“... anonymous personality’, whereby the painting would stand by and for itself, unsigned and self-free. It was all this, and all as high-minded as this; but it was also personal, playful, companionable. It was Braque teasing (and delighting) the dressy Picasso by buying him a hundred hats at a public auction in Le Havre; it was Buffalo Bill and ...”

“... Renaissance arguments than the painter needed to know; and this is not, as has been claimed, a self-contradiction, but the plain outcome of the undeniable fact that we no longer enjoy the advantages of Renaissance conversation. We must make up for it through reading and inference. I hear Bull snorting derisively in the wings. Renaissance conversation, one ...”

“... her way with great care and deliberation’ in London society. ‘The consequence is a (socially) self-conscious style of writing that often – especially in the late work – comes inflected with a disturbing mood or tone of bad faith. Again and again the poetry seems oblique, or held in reserve, or ...”

“... But it seems more likely that they were put off by her combination of aggressive sexuality and self-centredness – effectively, a grab for attention on Freeman’s part that violated the unspoken rules of the narrative compact. (One contributor tried to convince herself that Freeman intended her chapter as a satire, though the evidence shows that it was ...”

“... that a revolutionary cannot afford such sentimentality – as proof of his excessive powers of self-control. However, might this anecdote not simply bear witness to an extreme sensitivity, and Lenin’s knowledge that it needed to be kept in check for the sake of the political struggle? In their very triviality, the details of the Bolsheviks’ daily lives ...”

“... the remotest event, the smallest recorded detail, may have meaning: its inclusion is therefore self-justifying; in any case, Parker, like all great scholars, loves what he knows. He knows the topography of Boston and New York, the evolving social history of a neighbourhood or particular street; he knows the route of the Democratic Party parade through ...”

“... a whole. Breivik’s hero Fjordman has graduated from the web to the pages of the Aftenposten, a self-described ‘conservative-liberal’ newspaper. He’s also writing a book about Utøya, partly subsidised by a fellowship from the Fritt Ord Foundation, Norway’s most prestigious free speech organisation. Nygaard, who is now the chairman of PEN ...”

“... phenomena, Cartledge argues, rendered less congenial both Thucydides’ ‘severe, and somewhat self-deluding claim … to tell objectively and accurately only the actual facts of the past’, and his decision to limit those facts to ‘significant political, diplomatic and military events and processes’. But the recent expansion beyond Thucydidean ...”

“... vulnerable countries with low emissions. But in this case it is not necessarily just a matter of self-interest prevailing over honesty and virtue. Climate change creates what Gardiner calls ‘a perfect moral storm’, within which it is difficult to keep one’s bearings. The key elements of this storm, which he enumerates with admirable – if exhausting ...”

“... leather and a little cap such as Orton himself used to wear. Here too an outfit that is not so self-conscious would serve the play better. The more ordinary it is the more shocking it will seem. 3 February. One of the cards of condolence we get on Anne’s death is unintentionally comical. ‘Sorry to hear your bad news!’ The exclamation mark is ...”

“... stomach and the rest of the body, and through the stomach’s role in transforming sustenance into self, anything that went wrong in the guts could wind up disordering not just the mind but the liver, heart, gall bladder, spleen, pancreas, lungs and skin. In addition to complaints located in the stomach, the dyspeptic might suffer ...”

“... advised Parliament to give Britain’s press one last 18-month chance to prove the efficacy of self-regulation. The outcome was the ill-starred PCC, and two decades of non-regulation. If Leveson is to have a more substantial legacy, his report must engage with two issues in particular: the circumstances in which someone can sue for a violation of ...”

“... Leavis and he had deliberately chosen them,’ Hilliard says. Ellis confirms this impression of a self-selecting and self-perpetuating praetorian guard of literary criticism: ‘Almost all my fellow students had been taught by men who were either former pupils of Leavis or very sympathetic to his point of view.’ It has ...”