“... of a rival patron, Pointel. Yet he could not possibly have said the same things to Pointel, whose Self-Portrait he dismissed as inferior. For Poussin, reading correctly was not so much a matter of having the right opinion, as of establishing an appropriate understanding of the way in which a response was related to its object. His position is set out in the ...”

“... but functions more as a travelogue of truncated dreams. This would be fine if it was written with self-conscious humour, but Sacks continually tries to redeem the minor key of the story with grand claims for what to the lay reader seems only a mildly interesting situation. Colour-blindness – complete achromatopsia, seeing no colour at all, only degrees of ...”

“... different from our own state of mind, and duly led the Abwehr, in the matter of subversion, to one self-inflicted disaster after another. The wonderful fictions evolved for enemy consumption by MI6, invented by the Garbo ‘network’ and recently explained in detail by HM Stationery Office, were far beyond the prudent Abwehr, while not a single Abwehr ...”

“... Calling the anonymous notice ‘shameful’, Ricks expresses the hope that ‘such cruelly self-righteous impercipience’ was later recognised by Eliot to be among ‘the things ill done and done to others’ harm which once he took for exercise of virtue’. Like Ricks, I had interpreted that admonitory statement about things done to others’ harm ...”

“... to speed to the brain like a tug on a bell-rope. Pain was the bell, a literal fire-alarm for self-preservation. This physiological representation of pain as a beneficial reflex mechanism, a warning system, appealed to anatomists, reinforcing their ‘all is for the best’ vision of the perfection of the organism. Neurology confirmed that human behaviour ...”

“... about Vidal’s family and about the Kennedy branch of it. We come to understand how divided a self he is; not just as between love and death but as between literature and politics, America and the world, the ancient and the modern, the sacred and the profane. And we get the goods not just about his sex life, but about his sexual nature.To get the ...”

“... is in kinds of people, their behaviour and their experiences involving action, awareness and self-awareness. The awareness may be personal, or may be shared and developed within a group. I am concerned with classifications that can change the ways in which individuals experience themselves – and may even lead them to alter their behaviour. The name I ...”

“... The distinction, tilted towards novelists, makes writers seem stuffy, even preachy, certainly self-absorbed. Between Sterne and Goethe, Flaubert and Chateaubriand, Calvino and Montherlant, who would you choose? Certainly Golding and McEwan are novelists in Kundera’s sense, but they do make an issue of their ideas. I’m not suggesting that they push ...”

“... date of composition. It was the first-century Jewish writer Josephus, taking a pot-shot at Greek self-esteem, who first suggested Homer had been illiterate, but it was not until the Twenties that the Californian Milman Parry set out to prove Josephus right. He dressed up in traditional Serbian costume and went looking for Homer in the highlands of ...”

“... instance, was lucky to escape the ERM fiasco as lightly as it did. It supported the Government’s self-evidently foolish decision to enter the ERM at the highest rate and had nothing to say when the inevitable happened. Had Labour won the 1992 election, we would now be wondering whether it would win any seats this year; and all because of a desire to appear ...”

“... force it told the incident-packed story of an inspired and inspiring career cut off at 44 by a self-destructive death. It showed what confusion there was in the early development of a young artist of limited talent and uncertain direction. It demonstrated how he found within himself an intuition of the course he had to take, an uncharted course for which ...”

“... where one might most readily expect to find evidence of sequelmania. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s self-fulfilling prophecy in The Terminator, ‘I’ll be back,’ used as the title for one of the essays here (by Lianne McLarty), hovers over the sequel as – always – something between a promise and a threat. This is a highly competent and readable ...”

“... truthfulness, honesty, unselfishness, generosity, modesty, composure, thoughtfulness, and a self-denying lack of ambition for external recognition’ in Vincent’s list – reticence could only be a beneficent trait. It was also believed to neutralise secrecy’s demoralising tendencies. Gentlemen could be entrusted with secret knowledge without fear ...”

“... with an avalanche of publicity. It calls into question the accuracy of the autobiography of the self-same Rigoberta Menchú, the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992, and revisits the old debate about the political impact in Latin America of the guerrilla warfare theorists who sprang up in the wake of the Cuban Revolution and Che Guevara’s romantic ...”

“... and triumph that spite, recrimination and finger-pointing follow one campaign and specious self-congratulation another though both were executed with the same skill and determination. Only the outcome was different – and that, again, mostly as a result of chance. After a hundred years in which the most inept British general could win wars in Asia and ...”