“... Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia), the largest of the groups still fighting, began as a self-defence force, the peasants’ answer to los pajaros. In the Sixties they came under the influence of the Communist Party, which takes its line from Cuba and the Soviet Union. Other movements developed, including the other main group still fighting, the ELN ...”

“... F.R. Leavis’s Scrutiny was launched. ‘Criticism’ was no longer a word to be murmured with self-deprecation. It had become an enterprise, an undertaking, a means of finding ‘solutions’ for ‘problems’ in the present culture. In Scrutiny’s second issue, Leavis published an article that asked: ‘What’s wrong with Criticism?’ Desmond ...”

“... himself as having ‘two hands and a weak head’. Why then did Chantelou invert the artist’s self-description? Although he would never have admitted it to Bernini (to whom he had proudly displayed his collection), Chantelou did not always find Poussin’s work visually satisfying, and it was to make up for his patron’s disappointment that the painter ...”

“... dope, spinelessness and pen-pushing in a railway station. Like his creator, Percy is a dissolute, self-destructive figure given to grotesque fits of passion; unlike him he is beautiful, powerful and prodigiously gifted, a haughty, arch-revolutionary Übermensch who – like Branwell himself before he ran out of drink money – arrogantly refuses to serve. The ...”

“... was simply a KGB-promoted myth: Philby, he said then, was motivated by ‘his calculating, self-contained cynicism’. Has Costello now fallen for the KGB myth or simply changed his mind? Some things are new, however, and fascinating. Many have suspected that Melinda Maclean knew more of Donald’s work for the KGB than she ever admitted. Tsarev and ...”

“... have (along with Reg Greer) a good deal in common. They are suburban, dull and rather idiotically self-important. They lurk behind their achieving offspring like guilty secrets. The problem is that the generations born this century have more than Freud to deal with when trying to define themselves against their background. There is the fact of DNA to be taken ...”

“... for example, misses the whole point of current debates about the canon: ostensible self-selection is what is at issue, far more than the particular names that finally end up on the list. The word ‘arguably’, tirelessly used by Prendergast, is probably a teaching tic, a way of seeming to allow room for the discussion you’re not going to ...”

“... they share many assumptions, and they both deal in elaborate fictions, where courtesy, tactics, self-deception and opportunism become inextricably entangled. Did Montezuma, the ruler if the Mexica of ancient Tenochtitlán, actually declare his allegiance to the Spanish Crown, or did Cortés just say he did? Did Cortés take Mexican courtesy for European ...”

“... Walter Sickert’s review of the Pennells’ Life of Whistler: ‘Now back in London after his self-imposed exile in France, Sickert realised Whistler’s worst fears and became “the pupil who would sell the soul of his master”. He savaged not only Whistler but, predictably, the Pennells as well ... Sickert continued to undermine Whistler’s ...”

“... dodgers, cheeky chappies of one sort or another. On match days it’s like a great army of the self-employed. Somebody once reckoned that if you shouted ‘Taxi!’ at the Lane about a third of the West Stand would want to know ‘Where to?’ And if you were to yell ‘VAT’ another third would start making for the exits. You could spend all day showing ...”

“... Morris was to be haunted by such contradictions throughout his life. There wasn’t much socialist self-management in his workshops, and while he himself was haranguing striking cotton workers in Lancashire, his craftsmen back home were producing woven silk velvet for £10 a yard. After two trips to Iceland in the 1870s, which confirmed his enthusiasm for ...”

“... de Beauvoir writes: ‘There was one book in which I believed I had caught a glimpse of my future self: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott ... I identified passionately with Jo, the intellectual ... She wrote; in order to imitate her more completely, I composed two or three short stories.’ What Jean-Paul Sartre thought of Little Women has gone ...”

“... Schiller and penned love poems, must have asked ‘Why jellyfish?’ And he must have led her self-importantly from these pulsing ‘nastinesses’ to the great problem of existence, contrasting his tiny truths of creation with the sandcastle sophistries for which men were willing to die. The tiny truths were real bricks which would build a palatial ...”

“... magical; and that play doesn’t preclude pain or historical sense. Realism could be allusive and self-constructing; we might believe in it because it was made up. When Saramago speaks, in The Stone Raft, of the ‘persistent indifference’ which supposedly separates the dead from the rest of humanity, he goes on mischievously to evoke his own earlier ...”

“... minorities towards acts of emancipation. In Imperium the relationship between this drive towards self-determination at the margins and the crisis at the centre is anything but clear. Certainly, the élite – from Gorbachev down – failed to react in time to the accumulating force of nationalist claims within the empire. But it was only one among the many ...”