“... 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 ...”

“... physical causal roles of such states. On the other hand, there are those who stoutly declare it as self-evident that no amount of physical information about the brain could ever imply the possession of a state of consciousness, so that conscious experience falls radically outside the domain of physical science. This dispute has recently centred on the question ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... which were to host the ‘West as America’ show, have withdrawn their invitations. Lynne Cheney, self-styled Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, has become a heroine to the Hurrah-for-Columbus forces by denying a grant to 1492: Clash of Visions, a documentary depicting Columbus in unflattering terms. Cheney said the film dwelt too heavily ...”

“... If we are accustomed to modern philosophy books we may even find it absurdly pretentious and self-conscious. Why doesn’t Burnyeat just tell us what he thinks? Why doesn’t Plato have Socrates just tell Theaetetus what he thinks? The reason is that here the dialogue’s form is most appropriate to its subject, which is perhaps why in this dialogue ...”

“... making of the British economy. Just after the takeover had happened, I ran into Bob Gavron, the self-styled Thatcherite Socialist who heads the very successful St Ives printing group. He asked me what had really happened. When I told him, his comment was ‘I give you eighteen months before you’ll have convinced yourself that you planned it all.’ But I ...”

“... Now he is being courted again by James Baker, as perhaps the only person who can square the self-imposed American circle whereby the Palestinians pick a non-PLO delegation. And a White Paper has been issued in which the Jordanian position on the war (no foreign troops, a regional solution, the concept of linkage) is recalled with pride. Perhaps nowhere ...”

“... the Calvinist surgeon, who wants it for his collection. Claude is then taken under the wing of the self-styled Abbé, an eccentric nobleman who employs him in the manufacture of erotic watch-cases. Claude, however, seeks a wider scope for his dawning mechanical genius. Unaware that his mentor is not only a pornographer but a restless experimenter and builder ...”

“... than ‘jokey’ means ‘jocund’. The slangy epithets, consciously vulgar and flippant, have self-disparagement built into them. In 1993 to call the airs of summer ‘sexy’ was a typically Auden-esque cheeky joke in passing; he can hardly be blamed for not foreseeing that sixty years later someone would be solemn about it. It goes along with ‘Vega ...”

“... the studio heads, the producers, ‘the boys in New York’; under his command are the self-willed, necessary rankers – actors, cameramen, writers – whom he must bully and cajole into a united force, fit to win individual medals. I must not suggest that Zinnemann, the autobiographer, is a grousing old sweat, vaunting his burden of ...”

“... on the art of memory and other occult subjects. In England he embarked on an intense course of self-publicity. He disputed at Oxford, held philosophical soirées with Sir Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville, and published a series of arcane Italian ‘dialogues’ with titles like The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast and The Heroical Furies. What exactly he ...”

“... I have made since my youth.’ His book is spontaneous, sincere and exhaustive. His method is self-analytical: he not only recreates the past, he interrogates his own role in it. It is demanding to read – and is written in a formal, three-piece style that is respected by the translator Harry Zohn. Not the least part of what interests me in Sperber comes ...”

“... with an exemplary scrupulousness. Hill regards style as, above all, a moral struggle. The intense self-consciousness about meaning that this view produces can make his own style something of a struggle for the reader, but it should be said that in this new volume the occasions when obliquity tips over into opacity are rarer than in some of the essays ...”

“... in abundance. Despite the manifest fact that Anita Hill was also black and just as impressively self-made as Thomas, the Democrats allowed themselves to be skewered by the absurd Republican contention that questioning Thomas’s behaviour was tantamount to ‘hightech lynching’. Manoeuvred into a corner, they failed both to defend Professor Hill ...”

“... of the editor. The disbandment of a team of highly-qualified journalists with the independence and self-confidence to carry out inquiries which might damage powerful people made Sunday Times staff still more subservient to the editor. Yoel Cohen shows in detail how, man for man and woman for woman, the investigative journalists on the Sunday Times in 1986 were ...”