“... most fascinating minor characters, and probably, in the end, functions as Marcus’s shadow self. An early member of the Dadaist group, he arrived on the Zurich scene shortly after the Cabaret Voltaire opened. He caused pandemonium when he mounted the stage and began reciting his ‘Negro Poems’, his Negergedichte, which were – as he knew ...”

“... with tractors and hammers and sickles. Aids has encouraged makers in genres which privilege wilful self-absorption to do something similar. Sometimes this works, but a lot of the art in Don’t Leave Me This Way fails. Describe these pieces, look to the descriptions for meanings, and pretty often you get messages of painful banality: Gay Beauty Myth (collage ...”

“... My scoffs were absolutely at a discount. And then I read a memorial interview with that old self-server and mass-murderer Robert McNamara. He recalled an occasion, quite early in the Lyndon Johnson presidency, when Jackie had come up to him at a reception in New York and beaten her fists on his chest, calling on him to stop the killing in Vietnam. Of ...”

“... might wonder ‘whether, notwithstanding impassioned aims, paeans of progress, endless pageants of self-illusions’, humanity’s ‘capacity of degeneration did not equal, and might some day exceed, its capacity of development’. The telling of this melancholy story is not helped by the book’s joint authorship: some relevant facts are rehearsed several ...”

“... that everyone, even the békés, actually spoke was included, it took the form of a condescending, self-alienating phonetics – the quaint mumbo-jumbo of the p’tit nègre. The novelists Maryse Cond and Simone Schwarz-Bart still write in standard French and look primarily to their African origins; their work is only faintly inflected by the postwar trend for ...”

“... Wokulski, an intelligent and sensitive man, is aware of his predicament and given to tortured self-analysis. Nor does he lack colleagues and friends to tell him what to do. Will he ever act on his realisation that he would have had no difficulty in rejecting his beloved if he had known her better? Though it centres on a single obsessive relationship, this ...”

“... on the mainland. Besides there is a strain of Chinese nationalism within Hong Kong society itself. Self-definitions are divided. The Hong Kong Transition Project, based at the Baptist University, has been testing public attitudes in the colony at regular intervals since February 1993. One of the responses it has charted is the answer to the question: ‘What ...”

“... the church he suffers agonies because he’s too prim to bathe naked with the other men. He’s self-absorbed and selfless at the same time, accident-prone, masochistic: a kind of holy fool. But just as he grates intolerably on our nerves, nothing but an ‘Odd Bod’, as his fellow students claim, ‘a queer bird, a stork, a mantis, a gawk’, we glimpse ...”

“... chair, perch himself on a stool, and shave. This was one of Sunday’s simple-minded pleasures and self-indulgences: to shave at what time one pleased, and as long as one pleased, with the children nearby, watching, convincing one that a morning stubble was an amazing thing, and that the shaving instruments were holy tools, and that the act of sprinkling water ...”

“... for which reason, perhaps, they find him fascinating. Good will and the instinct for self-preservation therefore commend to him a role which he likens to that of Scheherazade, a teller of distracting tales. It is a role of which both he and they tire, as prison life gradually becomes the only real life, but his habit of ruminating on the past ...”

“... the draughtsman of papers to be reviewed by a public body’. Jefferson did not exhibit the same self-knowledge and when he complained to Franklin during the course of the debate over the Declaration of Independence about the ‘degradations’ and ‘mutilations’ of his draft, Franklin was reminded of an incident from which, he said, ‘I took my ...”

“... Jacqueline’s central and totemic position in this icon as tragic queen, figurehead, sustainer, self-exposer, survivor, is an allegory of her having played, on the evidence of her appearances in the works, a more comprehensive role in Picasso’s life than any of his other women, not least because she was part of that life for nearly twenty years, was there ...”

“... the one hand by the spread of scientific attitudes and on the other by a new Protestant ethic of self-help and stoicism in the face of suffering, he concluded, with admirable honesty, that there remained something mysterious about how exactly faith in unaided human powers triumphed over traditional fears. For magical cures lost their prestige before modern ...”

“... of a devastating intellectual challenge but because of a social shift of élite interest and self-definition. There was, to be sure, a serious intellectual critique of wonder, which Bacon sourly defined as ‘broken knowledge’. He himself and those he inspired remained interested in monsters and anomalies, but the rarity, remoteness, brevity and ...”

“... the note of disdain with which the phrase is spoken, it seems that having a life is a matter for self-congratulation, and therefore the result of an individual’s character rather than merely the fact of existence and the effect of a series of random circumstances. Some lives are ‘life’ and some are not, but the precise nature of ‘a life’ is never ...”