“... sermonising has always been an important component of his work: he was drawing a youthful self-portrait, after all, when he created Duncan Thaw with his ‘minister’s way of talking about things’. The best parts of his books are often the lengthy bursts of polemic, especially in 1982, Janine where they are put, with cheerful implausibility, into ...”

“... Since Frank Lloyd Wright designed the spiral Guggenheim there have been few star architects self-effacing enough to create a museum that allows the contents to upstage the drama of the building. Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in Berlin and Tadao Ando’s sculptural concrete box at Naoshima are, typically, their own principal exhibits. Pei, in old ...”

“... no memories and no immediate sensory input (hence ‘flying’) would nonetheless be aware of his self. His most influential work was his proof for the existence of God, who was postulated as the ‘necessary existent’ behind the universe but not the immediate cause of all actions or things. His medical writing was equally ambitious. The Canon of ...”

“... why the Virgin does not respond joyfully to Gabriel’s tidings, but turns away in fear and makes self-protective gestures while she ‘cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be’, as Luke’s Gospel has it. Homilists emphasise Mary’s ‘rigorous inquiry and critical thinking’, for she is committed to her virginity and does not easily ...”

“... Less pertinently there’s the widowed Anne in a ten-year relationship with the solicitous, self-deprecating Walt (‘not much less than the time she’d been married to Serk’) and a grown-up Louisa being given a hard time by British customs officials. An abstemious novel would have sacrificed those chapters and, having evolved from what Choi calls ...”

“... of the doors.For the next five hundred years, Orsanmichele bore witness to Florence’s shift from self-governing state to Grand Duchy to key city (and, briefly, capital) of the Italian Republic. It was at the heart of Florence’s civic and cultural life; its upper floors served as the archive of contracts and testaments under Cosimo I de’ Medici in the ...”

“... couldn’t have chosen anyone better suited to the role: Julia is detached, pragmatic and without self-pity. After some painful, empty years she resumes things with Jim. The two sinners still go to Mass; they crowd into rooms that smell of ‘misery and whiskey’; they are, in the eyes of their fellow Catholics, perfectly respectable. Then Julia starts ...”

“... Throughout the foothills, meanwhile, free-range McMansions – often castellated in unconscious self-caricature – occupy rugged ocean-view peaks surrounded by what foresters grimly refer to as ‘diesel stands’ of dying pine and old brush.The loss of more than 90 per cent of Southern California’s agricultural buffer zone is the principal if seldom ...”

“... part of a team made up of both native and foreign painters. If we have fallen for Thomas Elyot’s self-professed ‘cholericke humour’, and been misled by his complaints about native art in our understanding of what was thought to be good, then Holbein and The Story of Tudor Art encourage us to look again at the riches of the Tudor visual ...”

“... Pan Am and Pepsi and Chase Manhattan who were fuelling Japan’s wildfire growth. The school was self-consciously progressive, with college-style lectures and lots of free time. In seventh grade, we all took its flagship course, ‘Japan: Lands and People’ (JLAP).JLAP was designed by Jack Moyer, a craggy, outdoorsy guy who had a PhD in marine ...”

“... belongs to a unitary Eurasian mythology, it is anchored in a universal human experience, ‘the self-image of the body’. Asymmetrical de-ambulation is the privileged signifier of contact with death, because all living beings are symmetrical in form, and among them humans are specifically biped. The impairing of the capacity to walk amounts to putting a ...”

“... clear enough: it is designed to suggest the distance between the Stuart monarchy, conceived as a self-contained household, and the landed class outside it – in other words, its lack of roots in the social soil at large. The unspoken antonym is feudal. This picture of the state is not a quirk but a logical requirement of the claim that the aristocracy was ...”

“... the offices of the New Yorker, be yond the reach of MacArthur’s censors.) An endless string of self-serving interviews with MacArthur portrayed the Occupation a one-man band in which he had single-handedly brought democracy to a people said to be hopelessly addicted to militarism. In private, the correspondents, who knew better, called Japan’s autocratic ...”

“... that is intolerable, it is the waking up happy.’ Woods goes on: ‘Gay critics made gay writers self-conscious about their sense of appropriate endings. No central gay character could be murdered or commit suicide, even if for reasons clearly represented as being other than homosexuality itself, for fear of enforcing the myth of the tragic queer.’ (A ...”

“... of some of the poet’s manuscripts, The Last and Greatest Art, evidence of Pope’s own endlessly self-correcting and self-refining perfectionism can himself as Pope’s biographer write as he does here. There is in the Sargasso sea of eyewash a real failure to understand that individual, inward apprehension of language ...”