“... them with discretion to check his other carefully-researched material. He shows Alison Uttley as a self-deluding romantic, a shrewd, quarrelsome businesswoman and a compulsive housekeeper, patching and jam-making to the end in a heroically untidy kitchen. But it is impossible not to think of her as a sorceress, a storyteller whose tales were produced only at a ...”

“... portrait, drawn by a master impressionist, replaces the braggadocio and lies of a virtuoso ...”

“... comedy, and far too crude to work as anything else. Smith works in a certain amount of protective self-consciousness: Gen and Eric are obviously meant to be a ‘generic’ couple. But does that help the reader, really – knowing that the author knows her targets are obvious? In The Accidental, Smith writes very well from the adolescent perspective, only ...”

“... about painting and how it’s done that no one else thinks to tell you – of an Alice Neel nude self-portrait, for example: ‘Her face is rather tight around the mouth, as a painter’s face can be when reaching a decision about just how a detail seen in the mirror can be put down with the next stroke’ – or maybe has noticed: ‘It comes to you that ...”

“... or compensated to an extent that they had not been before and would not be by either informal self-regulation or regulation by a civil service department. Even if no engineer can design a heat engine capable of reaching more than 40 per cent of its maximum theoretical efficiency, 40 per cent is a lot more than ...”

“... do not see themselves as hard done by – is just one more example of the twisted mentality of self-exploitation that has spread through the world of employment in the last decade and a half. Today, there is reasonably broad agreement on what constitutes fair labour in the waged workplace, or there are limits at least to the range of disagreement. People ...”

“... more conventional documentary sources, his account is bogged down in irrelevant editorialising, self-conscious asides and strange literary detours; most egregiously, his analytical approach erases the very workers he claims to want to rescue from historical oblivion. He construes the Chinese state’s willingness to send workers to France as part of its ...”

“... despite his desire to hide his relationships from the public in an effort to project an image of self-sacrifice and total devotion to the German people, Hitler is known to have had affairs with a number of women, and spent his last years in a conventional heterosexual partnership with Eva Braun, a woman considerably younger than himself. Fit and ...”

“... with Syriza’s performance and everyone takes it as read that the Troika’s prescriptions are self-defeating. News that the former prime minister George Papandreou wanted to take time off from Parliament for a stint as a lecturer at Harvard was greeted with a shrug. As for Alexis Tsipras, Syriza’s leader, nobody thinks his time in student politics was a ...”

“... of what they were is still with us mentally, and Holt’s mind ensures that he is not the only self in that room. And what about people we think of often and scarcely see? Or people we don’t know at all but think about because we read what they write or because others tell stories of them? How could the deaths of these sets of people make a ...”

“... year or so, an illegal temptation, and not a passive one. My quest was dedicated and entirely self-regarding. I don’t think I ever thought about the desired men themselves as individuals with their own lives, only as emblems for something I needed and believed I could get from them. I made it hard for them to refuse. I didn’t, of course, force men to ...”

“... was entitled to what he or she could afford. For some, such as certain Chicago economists, the new self-restraint was difficult to understand: their model of ‘rational economic man’ didn’t seem to fit this case. To many people today, having gone through the purgative fires of Thatcherism, all that community spirit may seem too good – or too illogical ...”

“... her a chance to ‘create another life and a new time’. Virginia is no longer her childhood self, but neither has she escaped its ‘cold air’.Lispector finished The Chandelier in Naples in 1944, and wrote The Besieged City in Bern, where her husband was posted to the Brazilian Embassy. She was lonely, but found solace in the city’s medieval ...”

“... has increasingly been seen to encapsulate, or express, a nation drunk on its own mythology and self-satisfaction; or, as Patrick McGuinness memorably put it in the LRB of 3 January, one ‘high on its own supply’. We have been told that Britain – for which read England, for which read English people and English politicians (though two of the worst ...”

“... Thus were the British defeated. However, while the tiger is undoubtedly emblematic of Tipu, the self-styled Tiger of Mysore, and his fierce resistance to European colonialism, there is no evidence he had a particular European in mind. He may well have heard about the death of Munro – two of his sons were being held hostage by the British in Calcutta at ...”