“... 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 ...”

“... the most famous golf links in St Andrews, he ‘laid aside the obligation to be Borges, the public self to which his writings bound him’ and which he describes in his famous short fiction ‘Borges and I’. In another essay, ‘Digging up Scotland’, Reid again recalled Borges reciting Border Ballads and said he had been ‘much affected by being in ...”

“... it and breaking her trust. Near the end of the book, she describes the satisfaction she finds in self-denial, ‘a sick pleasure that felt like a hangover’. But it’s not all bad: ‘That restraint, that control at any cost, made me horrible at a lot of things, but it made me brilliant at my work.’Gyasi, who was born in Ghana and raised in the United ...”

“... private over the public as such critics do may be interpreted as a feminist gesture. But it’s a self-limiting challenge, for their language often chooses to exclude the wider community, operating in terms of jokes and quarrels shared within a closely-knit intellectual family. The repressive fathers are simply shut out, excluded by language. Feminist ...”

“... their strategies were demonstrably wrong and often absurd – and also, in the case of the GLC, self-serving. It went on to conclude that the Labour Party could never win an election under Mr Kinnock because he is ‘quite irretrievably’ just a ‘student union politician’. He is also ‘vacuous, verbose and comprehensively not up to it. The notion of ...”

“... the career, and to be unsanctimoniously unembarrassed about being serious – in short, he taught self-respect. With this he combined an approach that demanded that the text came first, and that the director and designer served it with clarity, lucidity, realism and grace. Lindsay Anderson cites the Periclean ideal as the model for Devine’s aesthetic: ‘We ...”

“... to overthrow. He may be tempted to reject the demand altogether. This reaction is naturally self-fuelling; the further one goes, the more irrelevant the demand may seem. However, the demand to get it right has great survival value. All the philosophers who have been found interesting for more than a very brief period of fashion have been driven by a ...”

“... his disastrous eight-year rule. Buchanan’s greed and guilt, his bloated and babyish egotism and self-pity, are surreally rendered: ill-at-ease in the land, insomniac, delusional, haunted by figures from history, by doubts which gnaw at him like mice (a nest of mice eventually colonise his intestines), he embodies the worst aspects of the national soul, the ...”