“... worst so mimetically maimed us as to make our – or anyway my – utter loathing for it a form of self-loathing . . . Fast-forward twenty-five years to my second exhibit: a campus in New England – old England on steroids; the hills pumped up into mountains, the little creosote potting sheds swollen to ark-sized dairy barns anchored on meadows big as ...”

“... on Station Road they sell well at the expense of the low. 4. Stone Flung Near Head of Observer The self-propelled mower guided along firebreak regrowth, fresh growth, growth sticking its head up too high, to be lopped off, tall-poppied, struck a blow for neatness and order, and so out of Shire rules to prevent spread, prevent the roll of fires, appease nervous ...”

“... would take as a compliment, a sign that he was living up to his sense of his properly disreputable self. At the end of the film, as Belmondo lies dying on the street – the law has caught up with him, Seberg has given him away – he says: ‘C’est vraiment dégueulasse.’ He means disgusting in the sense of shitty, a raw deal, a mess, but what is he ...”

“... internet in general, promise to fill in the gaps between society’s three cardinal points: the self (individual, spectator, voter), the masses (population, audience, electorate) and power (party, spectacle, government). The promise is partly kept. Individuals can and do form flash commonwealths of mutual interest. For me, it was merely reassuring to ...”

“... phrase was latched onto by Flann O’Brien, in his satiric denunciations of Irish falsity or self-dramatisation wherever it cropped up, whether with Gaelic Leaguers or island autobiographers. Between Synge of the exorbitant syntax and Flann O’Brien’s adept mimicry of Gaelic inflation (‘Ambrose was an odd pig and I do not think that his like will be ...”

“... shall recuperate the Malvinas, les Malouines, into renewed restiveness and the wasps of doubt, of self-doubt, of resolution, of intelligences swarm? ‘a culture of regressive repetitions ... ’ Brave men and a gallant ship, her namesake also sank in World War Two by bomber aircraft. Carried aboard were large mediaeval nails from the bombed cathedral, formed ...”

“... suspicious of books produced by the tape-recorder, for they offer endless scope for deception and self-deception. It is perfectly possible for such a book to be saying nothing whatever for long stretches, and no one, not even the compiler, will have noticed. Or it can be saying something important which, again, the compiler never intended and is not aware ...”

“... but do not form a coherent picture. Paolo, as we have seen, gives his factory away; Pietro is the self-hating painter we have looked at; Odetta becomes catatonic and is carted away to hospital; Lucia starts picking up and sleeping with young men who look a little like the visitor; and, most interestingly, Emilia returns to her native village and speaks to no ...”

“... movie star. In the first part of the novel, Orton establishes a comic voice for Susan as the self-styled ingénue in a world of cheap bedsits, desperate gay alcoholics and sexual decadence. Some of the details of Susan’s daily life are borrowed from Dorothy Parker’s Diary of a New York Lady, written in the Forties and subtitled ‘During Days of ...”

“... He is convinced that their descent into the meaningless reflects that of England, ‘confused, self-hating England’, where the plague of depression is ‘spreading like a virulent, dimly understood virus’. Consequently, he attends closely to the condition of the country in his mother’s youth and his own. He nominates 1956, the year of his own ...”

“... In both cases the faces seem to look inward – painfully (in the case of Kollwitz) or in stolid self-defence (in the case of Evans). Kollwitz insists that you feel; Evans presents faces which don’t offer the connections with a painterly tradition of facial expression that more formal or overtly poetic photographs would. Although less obviously so than ...”

“... has a reputation for cockiness, but like a lot of cocky people his problem is not excessive self-belief but its opposite. His writing is often stagily masculine, like a sensitive adolescent who swears too much at not quite the right times in order to show how manly he is. He isn’t, as Byron said of Keats, always frigging his imagination, but he often ...”

“... few years, supermarkets had become the normal mode of food-selling in the United States, and ‘self-service’ became the shopping revolution of the century. A commentator on retail trends called M.M. Zimmerman set himself up as worldwide promoter of the big new idea but it was several decades before other countries, each initially in its own idiosyncratic ...”

“... Ascendancy, are exemplars. The Anglo-Irish were notoriously eccentric and swashbuckling, full of a self-vaunting swagger that the less admirable side of Yeats found appealing. The wild old wicked man, as he liked to see himself, would link arms with a bunch of crazed, colourful peasants in opposition to the merchant and the clerk. Social conventions were for ...”

“... has already been lost. In the US and the UK inequalities of market income (wages, income from self-employment, dividends etc) carry through to inequalities of income after tax and benefits. In practice, it’s hard to alter this through redistribution alone: the key is to change the way the rewards of economic success are distributed in the first ...”