“... explore the relationships that other major French painters enjoyed with Spain. Delacroix’s small self-portrait of 1821 and a study for the old women in the foreground of his Massacre at Chios were hung on either side of Goya’s portrait dedicated to Ascensio Juliá. This is a brilliant combination of images which remains suggestive even after we have ...”

“... loss. ‘For a year now,’ he wrote of her interference, ‘she has cheated me out of my greatest self-conquest by talking at the wrong time and being silent at the wrong time, so that in the end I am the victim of her merciless desire for vengeance.’ But if Nietzsche was capable of seeing himself as a pitiful victim, he was also able to see the ...”

“... skateboarders to building engineers, this is not just carelessness on the part of insufficiently self-interested users; it is a critical part of the innovation economy. Why do they do it? Von Hippel identifies a number of motives. As with FLOSS, the innovator may benefit personally from the diffusion of an innovation because it increases the value of the ...”

“... invasion of Egypt. He effectively contests the portrayal of Orientalism ‘as a unified, self-confirmatory discourse’ by emphasising internecine disagreements. He provides an impressive list of Arab academics to challenge the suggestion that Orientalism has prevented Arabs from writing about themselves. Some readers will enjoy Irwin’s ad hominem ...”

“... are complex structures, containing some very delicate mechanisms. They have the potential to self-destruct. It might take a cascade of 1000 centrifuges operating continuously for a year to produce enough highly enriched uranium for a single weapon. On the other hand, Iran’s claim could be designed to divert attention from an attempt to develop other ...”

“... order to affirm the truculent, dignified singularity of things, which, like Paul’s ‘labile’ self or Robbe-Grillet’s ‘awkward residue’, by definition exceeds the machinations of ...”

“... guru derives from his Farewell Address, with its Kissinger-like cadences about the primacy of self-interest in international affairs; yet it was an act of almost sublime disinterest – Adams’s decision to send negotiators to France – that ranks as the most visionary act of foreign policy of the 1790s. Adams knew that he would divide the Federalist ...”

“... him, from art that fed people’s imaginations to ‘art’ that fed people. Buford got good. The self-deprecating jokiness of earlier sections of the book probably hides just how good he got. He cooks at home now, but he was good enough to pass at the grill station at Babbo, which has been called Manhattan’s top restaurant. Some restaurant skills are ...”

“... cuore, ‘heart’. But the word that most makes Montale look like a co-translator, rather than a self-sufficient original, is filtrando (‘filtering’), rendered as ‘straining’. For a moment, the English has an intensity which the Italian lacks: the eel strains in two senses, and it is hard to feel that if a word with the same ambiguity had been ...”

“... is beginning to be written. It assumes that the metropolis and the colonies were not self-contained realms (as the older ‘imperial history’ often assumed); it recognises that empires were made and ruled by individuals with often very different, even conflicting aspirations. Above all it recognises that all empires were ...”

“... something that has eluded all British governments. He has repeated, and appears to believe, the self-serving conviction of British businessmen that they would be world-beaters were it not for over-regulation, red tape, high taxes and Brussels. Although he concedes there is ‘society’, a ‘we’ as well as a ‘me’, his is to be a highly privatised ...”

“... originally conceived as the finale of the B flat Quartet, Op. 130, but later detached to form a self-sufficient piece. As the opening Allegro charges along with manic exuberance, there is a feeling of exploring uncharted territory: huge vistas are glimpsed but are tantalisingly out of reach. The pace is relentless, the dynamics always forte. Then suddenly ...”

“... Lambert’s Mainly about Lindsay Anderson* that Lindsay harboured similar thoughts about such self-imposed menialities. On the eve of filming O Lucky Man Lindsay has his ailing mother to stay in his flat in Swiss Cottage. Before she arrives he cleans up the kitchen and bathroom and is just tackling the fireplace in his mother’s room when the doorbell ...”

“... feed or cling or even manage its own temperature control. Most of its repertoire, instead, is self-advertisement. That is where, according to Hrdy, infant fat comes in. The baby is saying, not just ‘love me’ but ‘keep me.’ Unlike any other primate, it is born with a dimpled roundness which proclaims: ‘I am a healthy baby, a big, bonny baby ...”

“... through a gap in the curtains.’ There is too much on show in Three Dollars, too many details self-consciously disclosed. And in The Reasons I Won’t Be Coming, important scenes are frequently written in awkward, clotted prose. ‘We were at each other’s throats,’ says a young Jewish woman in one of the stories, an assistant working in a Moscow ...”