“... living in the former Soviet states – all this has been absorbed and contained. The famed and self-advertised virtue of the Russians – their doleful capacity to take punishment and carry on – would appear to be borne out. The market creeps up, not just on the Congress but on every citizen’s life. It is a very ugly and disruptive process. It breaks ...”

“... to a Post-Modernist obsession with the status of dehumidifiers as art objects, or with the self-reflexivity of the visitor’s gaze (literally enacted, if you want, with the help of a few mirrors). It can take on board the traditional museum connoisseur too, giving new life to the old debates about (in the case of the British Museum) what colour to ...”

“... unimaginative. When it quotes a poem, in acts as though, in the context, the poem’s meaning is self-evident. After Mondor’s lengthy, soft-focus tome, it is rather refreshing to read about Mallarmé’s financial and professional incompetence. Instead of idealising the poetic temperament above all else, this biographer occasionally expresses his ...”

“... to a different past, the one presided over by Gloriana rediviva; and the Queen’s own strenuous self-propaganda in the last years of her reign, unconvincing in her lifetime, became all too potent once she was dead. Ironically, the adulation was encouraged in part by James himself. Fulke Greville, whose Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney paradoxically extolled ...”

“... from Greece’s northern provinces. At one point, the Greek Communist Party advocated self-determination for the Slav Macedonians, which would have meant detaching a large part of northern Greece that had been won from the Turks during the Balkan wars of 1912-13. It is events such as these, many well within living memory (President ...”

“... be dismissed with ignominy from the Imperial service. It was a shattering blow to his honour and self-esteem from which he never fully recovered, although it also had the liberating effect of allowing the man of arms to dedicate himself full-time to his other vocation, the pursuit of letters. Ever since he first set eyes on it, Marsigli had been fascinated ...”

“... appreciation of its visual subject-matter immeasurably enriched. Unlike the traditional survey’s self-contained, totalising narrative, Nineteenth-Century Art will provide students with a point of departure for a multiplicity of investigations. For the modern period at least, the leftist struggle to transform the history of art appears to have been won ...”

“... girl) died at birth, and left the writer with a sense of forever being in search of his other self, an obsession heightened by heroic ingestion of psychotropic drugs in the Sixties. Banks’s own career bifurcates, if less pathologically than Philip K. Dick’s. As with the novelist/entertainer Graham Greene (acknowledged as one of his favourite ...”

“... implausibility of the idea that Mr Smith’s death alone could reverse the irreversible, the too self-conscious symbolism of the whole thing, which suggests that people were not welcoming a restoration: they were, rather, bidding a fond farewell to a political system whose passing they regretted but which they knew to be gone. Yet there is no reason why the ...”

“... is brilliant, stimulating, intriguing in the essay, yet the transitions are so vertiginous, the self-contradictions so blatant (they may of course be innate characteristics of ‘fantastic literary criticism’), that the whole seems less than a sum of the parts. At times, too, Pushkin the poet proves too protean even for Sinyavsky’s sudden changes of ...”

“... while yet. Although Mr Haughey’s tactic is premised on the belief that the Agreement is bound to self-destruct and that he will be able to capitalise politically on the resulting chaos, he must nonetheless be anxious about the wedge which has been driven between his party and the SDLP. The SDLP encouraged Dail bipartisanship on the Northern question, because ...”

“... mention in the essay contest on the theme of ‘The American Boy’. His entry is naively self-revealing: the typical American boy is not fearful of dangers. He should be able to go out into the country and drink raw milk. Likewise he should traverse the hills and valleys of the city. If he is Jewish he should say so. The 1940s in fact hold a ...”

“... and that is probably Powell’s intention, for it later turns out that the name was either self-invented or perhaps bestowed by an ambitious grandmother, who is determined the girl shall be a success in life, preferably as a ballet dancer, for which she shows remarkable aptitude. Henchman is a monster, an unusual specimen of a genre by which Powell has ...”

“... fees – whoosh! – all automatic. And there’s plenty left in the bank to buy burglar bars and self-defence items. Plenty left for me and the missus if you work for the Administration. Some people may not like it, but boy oh boy just look at this suit, man – Savile Row, Germiston. And these shoes – Italian, made in Boksburg. And this tie! Everything of ...”

“... with desire’, for another free one. The famous Hotel du Lac has another writer and self-acknowledged loser, this time Edith: as a tortoise, she knows that hares win. The setting is an expensive hotel, with more grotesque and more or less free ones. Edith is there because she disgraced herself by leaving an unsuitable fiancé at the registry ...”