“... pushed up above his forehead. He is like a wonderfully exotic rhinoceros, but with a grace and self-assurance that wouldn’t be out of place on the catwalk.24 August. Our GNER train from Leeds stops at Retford, where passengers are bussed down the A1 to Grantham, the line between being under repair. It’s around seven and the clouds are beginning to ...”

“... slopes. Buñuel points the camera at a goat about to risk the next precarious step, as though self-consciously for the camera, before it loses its footing and falls. He also finds a donkey being stung to death by bees. (Sour honey was the main export from the region.) The voiceover, accompanied by a piece of Brahms, announces that a group of shepherds in ...”

“... on anyone who ‘ever bothers you’. JFK told her she had a beautiful voice. Glenn Gould was a self-proclaimed ‘Streisand freak’. Streisand shrugged off the accolades: ‘I just thought it was bashert, as they say in Yiddish, which means “meant to be”. It felt as if I were simply fulfilling the vision that I had as a child.’In 1962, Barbra the ...”

“... with the rest of the community? It is just not possible.’ Heath believed in a Europe that was self-contained, tightly integrated and able to assert itself against American triumphalism in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In that sense, he remained Britain’s one true Gaullist and his case against expansion echoed the one that de Gaulle ...”

“... the Delius Cello Concerto it premiered). She thinks playing on bad cellos has made her a more self-sufficient musician. As Kennedy says, and as every player knows, the relation of every cello to its player is reciprocal. When I play my teacher’s high-school cello it sounds like a trombone in a shower; I am convinced that his subtle and sophisticated bow ...”

“... experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the ...”

“... of this letter and sets the tone for its future interpretation:There is a great deal of self-conscious ‘Bohemian’ boasting about swopping copies of Daudet’s risqué decadent novel Sapho (the story of a young man from the country hopelessly infatuated with a beguiling, corrupt, artist’s mistress) and about how ‘blue’ she is for ...”

“... Bukele wore a black tunic with pharaonic gold embroidery and a sash in the national colours, a self-conscious caricature of el presidente. ‘Bukele now is like a messianic figure,’ Picardo said. ‘Every event must have a red carpet. Ministers must stand when he enters a room. In their speeches, they always say “as President Bukele said”, or ...”

“... Levertov found something chilling about her command on the page, an ugliness in her aristocratic self-assurance: ‘You know, actually those dashes bother me,’ she wrote to Robert Duncan in 1961. ‘There’s something cold and perversely smug about E.D. that has always rebuffed my feeling for individual poems … She wrote some great things – saw ...”

“... under floorboards or digging them into the earth, of concealing the colour of your hair (self-Aryanisation by peroxide), of burying your feelings lest they betray you.Donald’s best friend, Roy Redgrave, discovered that his father kept a loaded .45 service revolver hidden under his bedside table. Roy knew his father as ‘a happy-go-lucky man’, so ...”

“... by the Lawrences (the document was duly processed in the incident room) and whether Gary Dobson, self-confessed ‘nigger-hater’, really did borrow a Bob Marley CD from the Acourts (not whether this provided him with an alibi on the night of the murder), rather than the sufficiency of evidence in the case. It is the lack of a sense of proportion ...”

“... to them. The families of the dead boys were represented by Maurizio Ribeiro, a very young, very self-important lawyer, never on time. He was suspicious of me because I asked about the evidence against Franco. He assumed I was on Franco’s side and was wary of my meeting the dead boy’s parents. Finally he agreed, but the meeting had to take place in the ...”

“... nearly all of them women, are so simple and direct that even two of Rembrandt’s most famous self-portraits, one at either end of his life, seem almost coarse by comparison. I’m sure it’s the tranquillity of the Vermeers rather than its small size, that makes it an untiring exhibition to see. And how small some of the pictures turn out to be, some of ...”

“... failed to use the period of extraordinary growth to create the basis for long-term, and more self-sustaining, development. Both Germany and Japan, after suffering military defeat, economic ruin and enemy occupation, became major economic powers within a long generation. A closer comparison is offered by strongly nationalist South Korea, which took ...”

“... sanctions, in which vulnerable people have their benefits withheld as a form of punishment – a self-defeating policy whose cruelty is hard to overstate. We thus arrive at the topic that more than any other sums up the decade since the crash: inequality. For students of the subject there is something a little crude about referring to inequality as if it ...”