“... too. I am writing myself into my own story, and I am telling it from within.’ Well, yes and no. Self-defeating though the authentic-manuscript game may be, play along with it, take it to its logical conclusion, and you run up against an interesting question of appropriation. There is no framing narrative to explain how we come to be reading Matt’s ...”

“... of the novel hinges in part on its perfect symmetry of style and subject. A woman of extravagant self-conception doomed to mediocrity in the banlieue of Yonville – someone, as Lydia Davis put it, ‘whose character fatally determined the course of her life’ – is mirrored in a prose in which intention and automatism, will and fate, are themselves ...”

“... put it: ‘I ran away to Paris. Not with Max. Alone.’ In Paris she completed her first major self-portrait, Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937). A wild-haired Leonora dressed in riding clothes sits in a room with her hyena familiar; behind her on the wall hangs a rocking horse, and through the window a second horse gallops. The painting features many of the ...”

“... that the world ‘out there’ has somehow become invisible, little more than a background to the self? Salt and Silver catalyses such reflections. Oddly enough, after each of my visits to Tate Britain, I went away with a sense of having been looking at, or into, a world so quiet I felt I was holding my breath. Not, of course, that noise can be ...”

“... government and the Ma Ba Tha. The 2008 constitution forbids monks to engage in politics but as the self-appointed ‘guardian’ of the Burmese race and religion, the Ma Ba Tha has attacked Muslims and other ethnic minorities, and made itself an unofficial instrument of USDP propaganda. Its ‘voter education’ programmes amount to little more than attacking ...”

“... has never looked so good as here, set beside the Moroccan scenes. Translating the theme of the self and of the wilds that surround it to muted northern skies, the painter’s empathy expands. How touchingly makeshift, the low knoll in the bleak Thracian wastes that has become the poet’s sole preserve. How humane, the barbarian who has come to bring him ...”

“... is economically active but not politically engaged. It promotes private autonomy over collective self-government, and economic freedom over political freedom. Under cosmopolitanism conditions, a constitution is no longer conceived as a document enshrining the fundamental laws of a people. Instead, its meaning must be continuously re-interpreted in the light ...”

“... guerrillas, the army, and the paramilitary death squads, which emerged in the 1980s as civilian self-defence contingents and worked with the army, often in conjunction with drug mafias. At least six million people have been displaced. The government has tried, and failed, to negotiate peace with the Farc on three occasions since it took up arms in 1964 to ...”

“... called Memories Look at Me – was almost a sideline for him, occasional, but unusually pure and self-consistent. Poetry was reserved for encounters with the unsettling (das Unheimliche, as German has it), for sinister or joyful impossibilities, for moments when existence abruptly swelled or dwindled. Words like ‘mystical’ and ‘surreal’ get tossed ...”

“... illustrious, predatory queer; inventor and supporter of colleagues and hangers-on; impresario and self-appointed hero of a tradition that he put together from all kinds of sources – Buddhist, Hebraic, European, pre-Columbian – in order to loosen the American grain and leave a lasting trace. In fact American poetry was already a rich, eclectic mix when he ...”

“... that pretends to reveal the ways fiction, drama or poetry ‘work’ – is tvtropes.org, the self-described ‘all-devouring pop-culture wiki’ which has done so much to contribute to our understanding of modern literary and artistic tropes, trends, devices, possibilities and all forms of story structure. TV Tropes helps to explicate, illustrate and ...”

“... they had less chance to sell their work. Wilkie Collins described the taste and enthusiasms of the self-made industrialists of the mid-19th century: they wanted paintings, he said, with ‘interesting subjects, variety, resemblance to nature, genuineness of the article, and fresh paint’. So there was money in new art – the Pre-Raphaelites were favoured in ...”

“... voted against both the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, and exhibited a no-nonsense clarity and self-possession in the Clinton impeachment.The ex-FBI director James Comey evidently shares Nadler’s reservations about the fast work by the attorney general, and is bewildered by Mueller’s non-decision on obstruction. During ‘An Evening with James ...”

“... to the antiquities is a tiny figure sitting alarmingly high up on the temple’s architrave: a self-portrait by the artist, William Pars, the designated draughtsman on the Ionian Expedition of 1764-66. In reality Pars was paying as much attention to the charm of the courtyard scene as he was to the antiquities, though not in a way that pleased everyone: as ...”

“... state of eruption’, and in Europa ’51 as the bereaved mother who finds God. From Clare’s self-imposed hunger she can conjure Simone Weil, who left the anti-fascist Spanish Brigades when she witnessed the murder of a child. ‘When a child is killed for someone else’s idea,’ Howe concludes, ‘the idea is finished.’Which brings us back to the ...”