“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... problem has to do with Binet’s fastidious approach to his story, though it turns out that his self-questioning method is also part of the reason for his success. His subject matter unavoidably raises the question of how we may speak about unspeakable atrocity. The mind can’t easily process the sheer number of those killed in the course of the Second ...”

“... Bond has changed in Skyfall. Whatever his manner, he is serving his country now instead of his own self-regarding virtue. This is certainly a quaint old fantasy of Englishness – I would have thought the reigning fantasy had more to do with robbing the country – and I had better end before I start quoting Henry ...”

“... book – stardust, idiosyncrasies and all. She is, as she confesses, over-excitable; she is also self-examining. Its sometimes confusing final pages refer to ‘the too, too solid flesh’ of Gertrude, which seems like a slip, and are especially reliant on these stories of hers. One of them has her wanting and not wanting to write a book, and seeking refuge ...”

“... I think of ancient bronzes: a thin-skinned balloon of brown-green metal, light and yet strong, self-consciously opposed both to the ‘pitiless bronze’ of ancient weapons and armour, and to the blockish stone sculptures with which they had to share ancient exhibition space, unmalleable marbles that could never imagine kicking back so high and with such ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... as well as with himself: a sort of art-historical Humbert Humbert with traces of Clive Linley, the self-obsessed composer in Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam. He also has an Irish Catholic background replete with sodomitical priests and echoes of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This upbringing has made him unable to separate a love of art from sexual ...”

“... troubles: he had been barely a month in the job. Whatever hopes Ahern may have cherished that his self-sacrifice would be rewarded with a plum EU position disappeared. The Lisbon vote revealed a striking distrust of the main political parties, which despite holding more than 90 per cent of seats in the Dáil were unable to muster a majority of voters behind ...”

“... a hefty inheritance, set sail for Australia, where thanks to family connections and thuggish self-interest he eventually reinvented himself as a Tasmanian aristocrat. The first archivist to whom Shakespeare reveals his ancestry warns him: ‘If I was you, I would not go around divulging that information . . . He’s a man of whom I’ve heard not one ...”

“... with the predictable and much-predicted consequence that it pleased nobody else. Its long orgy of self-indulgence began immediately after the 1997 election, when the Parliamentary Party rejected Kenneth Clarke as its next leader. Clarke was unquestionably the best of the candidates and indeed the only one who was unquestionably qualified for the job. Yet ...”

“... explore the softer edges of emotion, the ways in which people suffer dents and injuries to their self-esteem. The new book seems more contemplative than his earlier work. But, as in all his novels, he is writing about characters in deadlock, about people who are baffled by their own experience. The Trotters, he writes, are ‘all of them inscrutable, even to ...”

“... unreliable third-person voice; and the narration is such a garble of mismatched registers, self-contradictions and pointless circumlocutions that it adds yet another layer of unreality to something which has little concern with verisimilitude in the first place. Ordinary words and phrases frequently appear in quotes – ‘“pop” or ...”

“... for goodness: it is a form of post-traumatic shock that occurred after she tried to prevent the self-immolation of a Muslim woman on a Toronto street corner. But this historical or political twist does not displace the novel’s fundamental debate about women’s art and its reception. Reta’s first novel is praised for its ‘subversive insight’ by a ...”