“... and produced as ‘conceits’ by the ingenuity of the author, in order, in some deeper self-indulgence, to admire them and celebrate their unexpectedness as ‘realities’. Thus an external referent – the contingency of the inspiration (or Einfall) – is drawn inside the work and made to seem organic and inevitable. We have already seen Grass ...”

“... provisions into law. Not only do they go beyond the current (unlawful) practice, they are also self-evidently contrary to constitutional principle. It is tempting to think, however, that the changes proposed in Part III of the Police Bill do not matter much because, even if enacted, they will be struck down, either by British courts or eventually in ...”

“... so engrossing that he seemed not to share the ennui, the sexual privation, the hangovers and the self-disgust that afflicted almost everybody else. The other exceptions were the doctor and a midshipman, who had been at Winchester together. These Wykehamists contentedly passed the hours walking the deck together, rarely speaking to anyone else, and then only ...”

“... from 100 per cent in 1953, 45 per cent in 1971 and 20 per cent in 1975) in favour of self-government within ‘a federation of nationalities’. The declaration also demanded ‘the immediate withdrawal from Ijawland of all military forces of occupation and repression by the Nigerian state’, and the complete cessation of ‘all exploration ...”

“... Reggie (The Sugar House), and her divorce and madness (Beyond the Glass), she leaves her fictional self on the verge of grown-up life. She could write about her schoolmaster father (the Botting of the Hillard and Botting Greek primers, who taught at St Paul’s), and her frivolous, snobbish mother (who called White ‘Tony’, rather than the inappropriate ...”

“... In an earlier conversation – not with the Devil – he has said that the artistic work as a ‘self-sufficient, objective and harmonious formation’ is an illusion, ‘something the bourgeoisie wishes still existed’. It would take ages to unpack this thought in detail, but it’s clear that Adrian is caught up in an artist’s version of Nietzsche’s ...”

“... in the materials of art, rather than the appearances. There is a long meditation on Yves Klein’s self-created blue, the blue of the Madonna’s robe, the blue of lapis lazuli from the mines of Afghanistan, describing blue both as the colour of the sky – ‘space, emptiness, infinity’ – and also the colour of adornment, and a reminder of Charlie ...”

“... of a new style; and it was not until 1847 that Schumann managed to concentrate on what for any self-respecting composer was the ultimate goal – the creation of an opera. But Genoveva, based on tragedies by Friedrich Hebbel and Ludwig Tieck recounting the life of St Geneviève, was hardly a success in Schumann’s own lifetime, and it has entirely ...”

“... criticism of Jews.In Novick’s words, the Holocaust has ‘mandated an intransigent and self-righteous posture in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict’ and ‘allowed one to put aside as irrelevant any legitimate grounds for criticising Israel’. According to Nathan Glazer in the second edition of American Judaism, the Holocaust gave Jews ‘the ...”

“... into an index of his strength. His mind is free of the lumber of precepts; intellectually he is a self-made man. Though precociously brilliant in the visual arts (according to Vasari’s Life, and arguable from other evidence), Leonardo was a late starter as a writer. Some isolated folios survive from the 1470s, when he was in his twenties, but the earliest ...”

“... the government through hot and cold wars – and cast themselves in the trusty frontier mould of self-made men and women. Like Westerners throughout American history, they deeply resented the East Coast establishment. Why did social prestige accrue to effete, Ivy League, ‘egg-headed, homosexual, left-leaning financiers’, as the Wisconsin senator Joseph ...”

“... his family draws near haunts the whole book, between the lines as well as in intense episodes of self-questioning. Who was this person who was ‘going on the pilgrimage’, ‘en anthropologue’, as he initially imagined, for research? There are obvious schematic answers. A Moroccan trained academically in Morocco and France, he has lived in ...”

“... with this notion is that it assumes security is a transparent concept, unsullied by ideology and self-interest. Because it benefits everyone – ‘the most vital of all interests’, John Stuart Mill called it, which no one can ‘possibly do without’ – it is immune to politics. Yet, as Arnold Wolfers wrote years ago, security is an ‘ambiguous ...”

“... was later established that other fires of the same kind had probably occurred in the past but had self-extinguished before being noticed. In this case, however, the fire took off. Inflammable gases produced by burning matter filled the space below the escalator; the wooden steps caught fire and the blaze spread to the two adjoining escalators. In the upper ...”

“... didn’t, and died a month later.) But when Larkin’s letters are published he says: ‘All that self-loathing, at full spurt, bubble, ooze & drip. His tribe laps it up.’ The letters are ‘stinking bile-green weeds’.Like Larkin, Hughes was a devout monarchist, and this shows in a letter to the Queen Mother thanking her for having him and his ...”