“... reports a fragment of the story of Francis Jansen, a Belgian photographer, friend and protégé of Robert Capa, who works for the Magnum agency, and has disappeared. A young man, our narrator, meets Jansen (‘when I was 19’) and offers to sort and catalogue his work. Jansen is friendly, but aloof, distracted, avoiding all his old friends, not answering the ...”

“... while debating whether he fits the category of historian. Much better use could have been made of Robert Brentano’s amazing essay on ‘The Sound of Stubbs’, which gets an endnote. But such lists are unimpressively easy to compile and doing so is a sort of Actonian party game, though one encouraged by Kenyon’s general tone and approach. True, the ...”

“... More than culture or class conflict, war reached the people and compelled them to acts of self-sacrifice based on patriotic identification with country and government. ‘War is the health of the State,’ declared Bourne, disillusioned that the masses did not rise up in resistance. In the Twenties, the French writer Julien Benda continued this ...”

“... tendency that sees the scientific worldview as one myth among many. That this is nonsense is self-evident: when one set of fashionable posturings has given way to another, the fossils will still exist. The story the fossils have to tell is that our ancestry split from that of other African apes around five million years ago. These early hominids, best ...”

“... marching forward to social conquests and economic disasters. She first dabbled in politics via Robert Antelme, a charming man with a reputation for generosity, a ‘saint’ according to his friends, who were never inclined to say the same of Marguerite. After much toing and froing in an I-love-you-but-can’t-marry-you vein, Marguerite and ...”

“... that is excessive and much that is reasonable in the early novels of the young American writer J. Robert Lennon. At 34, Lennon, already the author of four novels, plots his books with a rigour and restraint uncharacteristic of writers of his generation. Whereas his immediate contemporaries Dave Eggers, Colson Whitehead and Mark Danielewski all thrive on ...”

“... adversary and antithesis. As a follower of Booker T. Washington, Micheaux preached a gospel of self-help and individual responsibility. Between 1919 and 1940 (with one last epic, The Betrayal, in 1948), he wrote, directed, produced and distributed perhaps as many as forty feature films, exhibiting a tenacity unparalleled in American independent cinema. At ...”

“... Pacino comes across as possessing a curious mixture of ambition and lack of it; of swagger and self-effacement. He seems to have believed fiercely in his own art, but he was far more interested in the work of acting itself than in climbing the ladder and says he never had any interest in having a career. Probably the most important relationship in his ...”

“... its wealth; so he lavishes scruples on his readers. Heaney’s poetry is loaded with anxiety and self-tormented power. At times this is truly powerful, and at other times merely self-tormented. But this is nevertheless the grimace of a major poet.In much of his work, both in verse and prose, Heaney has struggled for a ...”

“... biographies of Keats appeared within a short time: W.J. Bate’s and Aileen Ward’s in 1963, Robert Gittings’s in 1968. Each is still very useful; all were admirable, if in different ways. W.J. Bate, who had been interested in Keats ever since he wrote his undergraduate thesis on the poet in 1939, paid special attention to Keats’s stylistic ...”

“... sight of something by the shore of the lake: turtles waddling in to end the story in the manner of Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ or Tobias Wolff’s ‘Poaching’: ‘They watch those turtles on their slow march and behold those ancient creatures, shell-backed and the colour of time, as they lower themselves, turtle upon turtle, disappearing into the ...”

“... try to avoid deceiving ourselves’. He cites the conclusion of the editors of a symposium on self-deception, that though ‘it promotes short-run psychological health ... Long-run psychological health is thereby constrained.’ He seems unaware of the research which suggests that the mentally healthy are more likely to have a deficient perception of ...”

“... book went to press too long ago for Obama to get a mention; Jeb Bush’s absurd claim to be a ‘self-made man’ – ‘few batted an eye at that description’ – is set up to be knocked down, however. In the second half of Outliers, Gladwell makes some bolder and not always so persuasive claims about broader ethnic contexts: Korean pilots are more likely ...”

“... it ‘without irony’. As the exhibition demonstrates, it was impossible to invoke it without self-consciousness, but that is not the same thing. The cult of the cult of ruins continued to serve British artists well, especially the neo-Romantics of the 1930s and 1940s. Paul Nash’s abstracted megaliths, geometric forms set in the Wiltshire landscape, are ...”

“... San Francisco, introduced by Helen Vendler. Vendler had already done an edition of Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ for Arion, printed on roundel pages – wheels of paper 18” in diameter – with work by several artists, including Willem de Kooning and Jim Dine, as well as a selection of Wallace Stevens with a frontispiece by Jasper ...”